Rigid Body Collision in a Haptic Environment

Virtual environments have in round been integrated with haptics and with rigid body collision. There are, however, few working off-the-shelf solutions of integration between a haptic environment and rigid body collision.

The aim of this diploma work is to connect the state-of-art haptic environment from Reachin Technologies AB with the latest ridig body simulation environment from Meqon AB, to create a haptic environment that is still easy to setup, but have configurable and flexible support for collision detection and handling.

Preliminary results from the project includes the design of Shapes-nodes that connects the object transform of the Reachin environment to the Meqon API. Grouping capability for combined rigid bodies will be added to enable the setup of complex objects.

Upon a working connection between the two systems more advanced topological configurations will be implemented, such as joints, spring/dampers and actions, that enable call-backs and interactions through routing. Every ability of the inter-system bridge will be configurable through scene-graph nodes and VRML interfaces.

Preliminary the implementation will only connect convex objects between the systems, but care must be taken to enable concave objects in the future.

This work will result in a toolkit for the Reachin API, that can be used to enable ridig body collision in the Reachin environment. The implementation of an example application for ergonomics testing will provide a proof of concept.

Good programming skills are needed, since programming will be conducted in C++, Python and VRML, as well as good insight in the structure of the Reachin API, template programming and the standard template library. Basic knowledge in the functionality of ridig body systems is favourable, however, not compulsory.

This project is suitable for 1 student.