Simulation of deformable environment with haptic feedback on GPU

Abstract

Interactive simulations of deformable bodies are a growing research area with possible applications in several fields, i.e. computer aided surgery. The main implementation issue is to mimic the real behavior of the body at the extremely high rates required by haptic devices. Since even high-end computers have inadequate performance, one possible solution is to exploit the parallelism of modern Graphics Processing Units.In this paper we present our research aiming at moving the whole computational process from the CPU to the GPU taking advantage of the computational power of the graphics hardware. We use a mass-spring model, augmented with local damping coefficients and volume preservation forces. Collision detection is performed against external rigid bodies with high complexity mesh, such as the skeleton's one. The user interacts with the model by controlling virtual tools, i.e. probes or tweezers. Haptic forces are computed on GPU and the results are asyncronously transferred to the CPU. Our approach can simulate the deformation of complex models with gravity and interaction with environment and tools at a frame rate higher than 1 KHz, making it suitable for visual rendering and haptic feedback.

FPGA-Based High-Performance Collision Detection: An Enabling Technique for Image-Guided Robotic Surgery

“…Another study presented a GPU-based approach to detect collision of items of 14.4 k, 2 k, and 1.7 k triangles with a processing rate of 153 Hz, which cannot meet the medical specification of 1 kHz (Mainzer and Zachmann, 2015). Nevertheless, Altomonte et al (2008) demonstrated the realization of a surgical simulation with haptic feedback at over 1 kHz rate, under a very high resolution. To achieve the comparable resolution, the previously mentioned FPGA cascading method has to be investigated and applied.…”

“…The OBB is also a cuboid, but flexibly oriented in 3D. Altomonte et al (2008) also demonstrates a full force feedback chain in an anatomical environment with a good performance.…”

Integration of New Features for Telerobotic Surgery into The Mirosurge System

“…The presented simulator is based and extends the work proposed in [1] to which the reader is referred. Each simulation step is composed by three phases: collision detection and solution, internal force computation, temporal integration of model configuration.…”

“…A different approach leads to MSMs [37] which have been widely used in surgical simulations [1,33]. In MSMs the body is discretized in a cloud of mass points linked by springs and dampers.…”

“…An implementation of MSM on GPU is presented in [13]: masses are allocated on a 2D texture and springs on a group of 2D textures where each element stores a spring connected to a mass stored on the same position. In [1] a method for physical simulation that relies on GPU and on MSMs to mimic in real time the physics of human organs is presented. The work proposes an innovative node ordering method and optimized spring forces computation that allow to obtain online simulation.…”