Broadmark: A Testing Framework for Broad‐Phase Collision Detection Algorithms

Abstract

Research in the area of collision detection permeates most of the literature on simulations, interaction and agents planning, being commonly regarded as one of the main bottlenecks for large‐scale systems. To this day, despite its importance, most subareas of collision detection lack a common ground to test and validate solutions, reference implementations and widely accepted benchmark suites. In this paper, we delve into the broad‐phase of collision detection systems, providing both an open‐source framework, named Broadmark, to test, compare and validate algorithms, and an in‐deep analysis of the main techniques used so far to tackle the broad‐phase problem. The technical challenges of building this framework from the software and hardware perspectives are also described. Within our framework, several original and state‐of‐the‐art implementations of CPU and GPU algorithms are bundled, alongside three benchmark scenes to stress algorithms under several conditions. Furthermore, the system is designed to be easily extensible. We use our framework to bring out an extensive performance comparison among assembled solutions, detailing the current CPU and GPU state‐of‐the‐art on a common ground. We believe that Broadmark encompasses the principal insights and tools to derive and evaluate novel algorithms, thus greatly facilitating discussion about successful broad‐phase collision detection solutions.