Minkowski sum is a fundamental operation in many geometric applications, including robotics, penetration depth estimation, solid modeling, and virtual prototyping.
Overview
In this work, we propose to represent the boundary of the Minkowski sum approximately using only points. Our results show that this point-based representation can be generated efficiently. An important feature of our method is its straightforward implementation and parallelization.
Benefits of point-based Minkowski sum
- efficiency,
- robustness (can even work for non-manifold models with open surfaces),
- easy implementation (i.e., no convex decomposition and no need to perform union),
- easy parallelization,
- multiresolution representations, and
- similar functionality as mesh-based representation