# Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing for Discrete and Continuous Collision Detection on GPUs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09918 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09918/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [NeuralSVCD for Efficient Swept Volume Collision Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00499/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a set of simple and intuitive robot collision detection algorithms that show substantial scaling improvements for high geometric complexity and large numbers of collision queries by leveraging hardware-accelerated ray tracing on GPUs. It is the first leveraging hardware-accelerated ray-tracing for direct volume mesh-to-mesh discrete collision detection and applying it to continuous collision detection. We introduce two methods: Ray-Traced Discrete-Pose Collision Detection for exact robot mesh to obstacle mesh collision detection, and Ray-Traced Continuous Collision Detection for robot sphere representation to obstacle mesh swept collision detection, using piecewise-linear or quadratic B-splines. For robot link meshes totaling 24k triangles and obstacle meshes of over 190k triangles, our methods were up to 3 times faster in batched discrete-pose queries than a state-of-the-art GPU-based method using a sphere robot representation. For the same obstacle mesh scene, our sphere-robot continuous collision detection was up to 9 times faster depending on trajectory batch size. We also performed a detailed measurement of the volume coverage accuracy of various sphere/mesh pose/path representations to provide insight into the tradeoffs between speed and accuracy of different robot collision detection methods.