Title: A 6-DOF haptic interface and its applications in CAD

Authors: Zhan Gao, Ian Gibson

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, P.R. China. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new general 6-DOF haptic interface, which is able to provide both force and torque feedback to point clouds, NURBS curves and surfaces and rigid heterogeneous material virtual representations. A feature of this approach is the haptic cursor, which has a shape and size, instead of just a point. We also present two CAD applications based on that haptic interface; an experimental haptic sculpting system for B-spline surfaces and a haptic-based method to draw a NURBS curve upon a point-based model. By taking advantage of our haptic rendering techniques, various haptic sculpting tools are developed to facilitate sculpting B-spline surfaces, resulting in more intuitive virtual sculpting paradigms. To draw a NURBS curve upon a point-based model is normally a difficult problem. However, this problem can be solved with relative ease using our haptic interface.

Keywords: computer-aided design; CAD; haptic interface; haptic rendering; force feedback; torque feedback; haptic sculpting; B-spline surfaces; NURBS curves.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2007.015713

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2007 Vol.30 No.3, pp.163 - 170

Published online: 10 Nov 2007 *

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