Physical Response to Collision between Deformable Objects
(Semester Project)
Description:
The CO-ME, Computer Aided and Image Guided Medical Interventions, is
an NCCR long-term project that involves many Swiss Institutes and Universities.
The aim of the project is to use the potential of information technology
for the optimization of medical interventions in order to improve both the
treatment of individual patients and overall health care for the whole society.
Our lab is contributing to the project by creating a biomechanical model
of joints. In this model, joint postures are calculated based on contact
between different tissues, rather than traditional approaches based on transformations.
In this case, it’s important to have a correct behavior of each comprised
tissue in order to obtain realistic postures.
The problem
We are working on a physically based deformation model for biomechanical
simulation of human joints.
This model will deform as consequence of the forces acting on it.
Most of these forces are resulting from collision between the different tissues
present in a joint. These forces, once calculated, will be used as input
for the model that will calculate itself the correct deformation, and possibly
produce reaction forces (that in turn, could produce new collisions).
Thus, the problem is to calculate forces resulting from collision.
Student’s work
The student is asked to implement a set of functions to compute response
forces due to collision between simple deformable objects (spheres, cubes,
etc.). The collisions will be detected using an existent library.
The functions implemented by the student will be based in an existent
efficient approach and will be integrated in the deformation framework.
Platform:
PC, C++ and a collision detection library (V-Collide).
