Force-Enabled Sculpting of CAD Models
Abstract Transferring geometrical information between Computer-Aided Design models and physical prototypes is a time-intensive task and as such is one of the critical bottlenecks in the automotive design process. Sculpting of free-form surfaces in force enabled CAD applications could bridge the gap between digital models and certain physical prototypes. In this paper a novel force-enabled surface manipulation method called stick-to-surface/stick-to-pen is presented. During sculpting, the haptic device is constrained to follow the virtual surface, and simultaneously the surface is controlled to follow the device. The trade-off between which follows which is managed by partitioning the Cartesian space into a browsing subspace and a manipulation subspace.