The interaction of various geometric objects in an environment has generally been of interest to design and manufacturing engineers. These interactions can take a variety of forms. The form of object interaction of interest for the proposed research is that of dynamic collision or impact. The stimulus for such research is automated assembly and manufacturing. With an increased focus on transforming manufacturing and assembly tasks into automated or semi-automated tasks, additional facilities are necessitated to aid in task simulations. While tools exist for some types of simulations, they are deficient for the simulation of impacts. Mainly such deficiencies are in the area of the kinematic simulation algorithms. It is the rectification and extension of such kinematic algorithms that is the nucleus of the proposed research. The simulation of impacts will be accomplished in a four phases: implementation of a dynamic collision detection processor; integration of solid modeling data into a kinematics program; integration of the dynamic collision detection process into a kinematics program; and development of techniques to guide the kinematics procedures through the impact.
