ABSTRACT

Numerical modelling and simulation of deformable objets is one of the focal issues in mechanical engineering and computational science. In the cases when the computational results need to be rendered haptically and graphically in real time (for example, in a medical training simulator), a suitable trade-off has to be found between accuracy and effiiency. The most commonly used numerical techniques for modelling deformable objects fall mainly into the following two classes: interactive methods, that are fast, but not always accurate, and physically based methods, that are accurate, but generally not interactive. In this paper we present a numerical method for the simulation of semi-deformable tubes based on oriented splines. The numerical results obtained with this method demonstrate its accuracy and interactivness.