Haptic rendering for dental training system

Immersion and interaction are two key features of virtual reality systems, which are especially important for medical applications. Based on the requirement of motor skill training in dental surgery, haptic rendering method based on triangle model is investigated in this paper. Multi-rate haptic rendering architecture is proposed to solve the contradiction between fidelity and efficiency requirements. Realtime collision detection algorithm based on spatial partition and time coherence is utilized to enable fast contact determination. Proxy-based collision response algorithm is proposed to compute surface contact point. Cutting force model based on piecewise contact transition model is proposed for dental drilling simulation during tooth preparation. Velocity-driven levels of detail haptic rendering algorithm is proposed to maintain high update rate for complex scenes with a large number of triangles. Hapticvisual collocated dental training prototype is established using half-mirror solution. Typical dental operations have been realized including dental caries exploration, detection of boundary within dental cross-section plane, and dental drilling during tooth preparation. The haptic rendering method is a fundamental technology to improve immersion and interaction of virtual reality training systems, which is useful not only in dental training, but also in other surgical training systems.

Real-time haptic model for soft tissue deformation in surgery simulation

The modelling and simulation of deformable objects is a challenging topic in the field of haptic rendering between human and virtual environment.In this paper,a novel and efficient layered rhombus-chain-connected haptic deformation model based on physics is proposed for an excellent haptic rendering.During the modelling,the accumulation of relative displacements in every chain structure unit in each layer is equal to the deformation on the virtual object surface,and the resultant force of corresponding springs is equivalent to the external force.The layered rhombus-chain-connected model is convenient and fast to calculate,and can satisfy real-time requirement due to its simple nature.Simulation experiments in virtual human liver based on the proposed model are conducted,and the results demonstrate that our model provides stable and realistic haptic feeling in real time.Meanwhile,the display result is vivid.

Controlling the contact levels of details for fast and precise haptic collision detection

For accurate and stable haptic rendering, collision detection for interactive haptic applications has to be done by filling in or covering target objects as tightly as possible with bounding volumes （spheres, axis-aligned bounding boxes, oriented bounding boxes, or polytopes）. In this paper, we propose a method for creating bounding spheres with respect to the contact levels of details （CLOD）, which can fit objects while maintaining the balance between high speed and precision of collision detection. Our method is composed mainly of two parts： bounding sphere formation and two-level collision detection. To specify further, bounding sphere formation can be divided into two steps： creating spheres and clustering spheres. Two-level collision detection has two stages as well： fast detection of spheres and precise detection in spheres. First, bounding spheres are created for initial fast probing to detect collisions of spheres. Once a collision is probed, a more precise detection is executed by examining the distance between a haptie pointer and each mesh inside the colliding boundaries. To achieve this refmed level of detection, a special data structure of a bounding volume needs to be defined to include all mesh information in the sphere. After performing a number of experiments to examine the usefulness and performance of our method, we have concluded that our algorithm is fast and precise enough for haptic simulations. The high speed detection is achieved through the clustering of spheres, while detection precision is realized by voxel-based direct collision detection. Our method retains its originality through the CLOD by distance-based clustering.

Stable haptic interaction based on adaptive hierarchical shape matching

In this paper, we present a framework allowing users to interact with geometrically complex3 D deformable objects using(multiple) haptic devices based on an extended shape matching approach. There are two major challenges for haptic-enabled interaction using the shape matching method. The first is how to obtain a rapid deformation propagation when a large number of shape matching clusters exist. The second is how to robustly handle the collision response when the haptic interaction point hits the particlesampled deformable volume. Our framework extends existing multi-resolution shape matching methods,providing an improved energy convergence rate. This is achieved by using adaptive integration strategies to avoid insignificant shape matching iterations during the simulation. Furthermore, we present a new mechanism called stable constraint particle coupling which ensures consistent deformable behavior during haptic interaction. As demonstrated in our experimental results, the proposed method provides natural and smooth haptic rendering as well as efficient yet stable deformable simulation of complex models in real time.