A Real-Time Haptics-Based Deformable Model for Virtual Prototyping and Simulations

Virtual reality technology plays an important role in the fields of product design, computer animation, medical simulation, cloth motion, and many others. Especially with the emergence of haptics technology, virtual simulation system provides an intuitive way of human and computer interaction, which allows user to feel and touch the virtual environment. For a real-time simulation system, a physically based deformable model including complex material properties with a high resolution is required. However, such deformable model hardly satisfies the update rate of interactive haptic rendering that exceeds 1 kHz. To tackle this challenge, a real-time volumetric model with haptic feedback is developed in this paper. This model, named as Adaptive S-chain model, extends the S-chain model and integrates the energy-based wave propagation method by the proposed adaptive re-mesh method to achieve realistic graphic and haptic deformation results. The implemented results show that the nonlinear, heterogeneous, anisotropic, shape retaining material properties and large range deformation are well modeled. An accurate force feedback is generated by the proposed Adaptive S-chain model in case study which is quite close to the experiment data.