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Abstract Designing an algorithm with a singly exponential complexity for computing semialgebraic triangulations of a given semialgebraic set has been a holy grail in algorithmic semialgebraic geometry. More precisely, given a description of a semialgebraic set$$S \subset \mathbb {R}^k$$by a first-order quantifier-free formula in the language of the reals, the goal is to output a simplicial complex$$\Delta $$, whose geometric realization,$$|\Delta |$$, is semialgebraically homeomorphic toS. In this paper, we consider a weaker version of this question. We prove that for any$$\ell \geq 0$$, there exists an algorithm which takes as input a description of a semialgebraic subset$$S \subset \mathbb {R}^k$$given by a quantifier-free first-order formula$$\phi $$in the language of the reals and produces as output a simplicial complex$$\Delta $$, whose geometric realization,$$|\Delta |$$is$$\ell $$-equivalent toS. The complexity of our algorithm is bounded by$$(sd)^{k^{O(\ell )}}$$, wheresis the number of polynomials appearing in the formula$$\phi $$, andda bound on their degrees. For fixed$$\ell $$, this bound issingly exponentialink. In particular, since$$\ell $$-equivalence implies that thehomotopy groupsup to dimension$$\ell $$of$$|\Delta |$$are isomorphic to those ofS, we obtain a reduction (having singly exponential complexity) of the problem of computing the first$$\ell $$homotopy groups ofSto the combinatorial problem of computing the first$$\ell $$homotopy groups of a finite simplicial complex of size bounded by$$(sd)^{k^{O(\ell )}}$$.