Six degree-of-freedom haptic display of polygonal models

We present an algorithm for haptic display of moderately complex polygonal models with a six degree of freedom (DOF) force feedback device. We make use of incremental algorithms for contact determination between convex primitives. The resulting contact information is used for calculating the restoring forces and torques and thereby used to generate a sense of virtual touch. To speed up the computation, our approach exploits a combination of geometric locality, temporal coherence, and predictive methods to compute object-object contacts at kHz rates. The algorithm has been implemented and interfaced with a 6-DOF PHANToM Premium 1.5. We demonstrate its performance on force display of the mechanical interaction between moderately complex geometric structures that can be decomposed into convex primitives.