A Novel Method for Computing the Distance Between Convex Polyhedra

A novel method to compute the distance between convex polyhedra is provided in this paper.First of all,we prove the distance between convex polyhedra just equating with the length of their common perpendicular segment ,and then an optimization problem is proposed to obtain the length by vertical projection.Finally,two methods are extended to solve the problem.The com-plexity of the methods is discussed.The main advantage of the method is a few storages needed and only the vertexes information of the two convex polyhedra needed.It can be generalized to computing the distance between moving objects and the maximum or minimum span of a convex polyhedron.