A Penetration Metric for Deforming Tetrahedra using Object Norm

In this paper, we propose a novel penetration metric, called deformable penetration depth PD
_d
, to define a measure of inter-penetration between two linearly deforming tetrahedra using the object norm [1]. First of all, we show that a distance metric for a tetrahedron deforming between two configurations can be found in closed form based on object norm. Then, we show that the PD
_d
between an intersecting pair of static and deforming tetrahedra can be found by solving a quadratic programming (QP) problem in terms of the distance metric with non-penetration constraints. We also show that the PD
_d
between two, intersected, deforming tetrahedra can be found by solving a similar QP problem under some assumption on penetrating directions, and it can be also accelerated by an order of magnitude using pre-calculated penetration direction. We have implemented our algorithm on a standard PC platform using an off-the-shelf QP optimizer, and experimentally show that both the static/deformable and deformable/deformable tetrahedra cases can be solvable in from a few to tens of milliseconds. Finally, we demonstrate that our penetration metric is three-times smaller (or tighter) than the classical, rigid penetration depth metric in our experiments.