Dynamic Minkowski sum of convex shapes

Computing the Minkowski sums of rotating objects has always been done naïvely by re-computing every Minkowski sum from scratch. The correspondences between the Minkowski sums are typically completely ignored. We propose a method, called DYMSUM, that can efficiently update the Minkowski sums of rotating convex polyhedra. We show that DYMSUM is significantly more efficient than the traditional approach, in particular when the size of the input polyhedra are large and when the rotation is small between frames. From our experimental results, we show that the computation time of the proposed method grows slowly with respect to the size of the input comparing to the naïve approach. (a) ellipse (b) slightly rotated ellipse