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.

Enriching Triangle Mesh Animations with Physically Based Simulation.

We present a system to combine arbitrary triangle mesh animations with physically based Finite Element Method (FEM) simulation, enabling control over the combination both in space and time. The input is a triangle mesh animation obtained using any method, such as keyframed animation, character rigging, 3D scanning, or geometric shape modeling. The input may be non-physical, crude or even incomplete.

Adaptive 6-DoF Haptic Contact Stiffness Using the Gauss Map.

The penalty method is a popular approach to resolving contact in haptic rendering. In simulations involving complex distributed contact, there are, however, many simultaneous individual contacts. These contacts have normals pointing in several directions, many of which may be parallel, causing the stiffness effectively to add up in a temporally highly-varying and unpredictable way.

6-DoF Haptic Rendering Using Continuous Collision Detection between Points and Signed Distance Fields.

We present an algorithm for fast continuous collision detection between points and signed distance fields, and demonstrate how to robustly use it for 6-DoF haptic rendering of contact between objects with complex geometry. Continuous collision detection is often needed in computer animation, haptics, and virtual reality applications, but has so far only been investigated for polygon (triangular) geometry representations. We demonstrate how to robustly and continuously detect intersections between points and level sets of the signed distance field.

Implicit Multibody Penalty-BasedDistributed Contact.

The penalty method is a simple and popular approach to resolving contact in computer graphics and robotics. Penalty-based contact, however, suffers from stability problems due to the highly variable and unpredictable net stiffness, and this is particularly pronounced in simulations with time-varying distributed geometrically complex contact. We employ semi-implicit integration, exact analytical contact gradients, symbolic Gaussian elimination and a SVD solver to simulate stable penalty-based frictional contact with large, time-varying contact areas, involving many rigid objects and articulated rigid objects in complex conforming contact and self-contact.

Stable Anisotropic Materials.

The Finite Element Method (FEM) is commonly used to simulate isotropic deformable objects in computer graphics. Several applications (wood, plants, muscles) require modeling the directional dependence of the material elastic properties in three orthogonal directions. We investigate linear orthotropic materials, a special class of linear anisotropic materials where the shear stresses are decoupled from normal stresses, as well as general linear (non-orthotropic) anisotropic materials.