ERGOBOSS: Ergonomic Optimization of Body-Supporting Surfaces.

Humans routinely sit or lean against supporting surfaces and it is important to shape these surfaces to be comfortable and ergonomic. We give a method to design the geometric shape of rigid supporting surfaces to maximize the ergonomics of physically based contact between the surface and a deformable human. We model the soft deformable human using a layer of FEM deformable tissue surrounding a rigid core, with measured realistic elastic material properties, and large-deformation nonlinear analysis.

Evaluating the Efficiency of Six-DoF Haptic Rendering-Based Virtual Assembly Training.

Haptics plays an important role in training users to assemble mechanical components, such as airplane or car parts. Because mechanical components are often geometrically complex, efficient collision detection and six-DoF haptic rendering of contact are required for virtual assembly, and this has been extensively explored in prior work. However, as this article shows, this alone is not sufficient for efficient virtual assembly training.

6-DoF Haptic Rendering of Static Coulomb Friction Using Linear Programming.

Simulating frictional contact between objects with complex geometry is important for 6-DoF haptic rendering applications. For example, friction determines whether components can be navigated past narrow clearances in virtual assembly. State-of-the-art haptic rendering of frictional contact either augments penalty contact with frictional penalty springs, which do not prevent sliding and cannot render correct static friction, or uses constraint-based methods that are difficult to meet the stringent haptic loop computation time requirements for complex geometry.