FCL was forked and a large part of the code has been rewritten. This library is the backbone for the manipulation planner of Mech-Mind Robotics and has been used in thousands of robot workstations that we have deployed.
Compared to the original FCL library, the main new features are:
- a new incremental penetration distance algorithm described in this paper
- a new implementation of the convex collision algorithms (GJK/EPA/MPR, in this subdir). The new EPA is 2x faster than libccd in the original FCL library
- optional header-only integration,
Eigenis the only dependency (libccd is no-longer required) - the support of new geometry shapes such as height map and tetrahedron mesh
- re-write and performance optimization of traversal collision detection algorithms for bvh/octree/heightmap
- better multi-threading support with a new broadphase AABB-tree and read-only narrowphase interface
- efficient translational continuous collision detection
- various bug-fix and performance optimization
Please make sure Eigen is installed on your system and can be found in the include path. After that, you can simply copy the /include directory (which contains fcl/fcl.h and others) to your own project. In this way, there is no binary library to link to.
Alternatively if you want to build a library, CMakeLists.txt can be used to generate makefiles in Linux or Visual studio projects in windows. In command line, run
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..Next, in linux, use make to compile the code. In windows, there will generate a visual studio project and then you can compile the code.
The narrowphase interface fcl::collide is almost the same as the original FCL library. In some cases, it can be used as a drop-in replacement. Please refer to the document in the origial FCL.
For the broadphase, a new AABB tree inspired by JoltPhysics is implemented for better concurrency support. The test code might be a good starting point.
We have learned a lot regarding collision detection from our experience of deploying of robot manipulators. A summary of several design decisions behind this library is here
If you find a bug or have a new feature request, please send me an email.