Haptic Simulation of Multibody Contact Dynamics for Fixture Loading Planning

The paper presents a haptics system for multibody contact dynamics simulation. The purpose of the study is for fixture loading planning, which is to plan the applying force on a workpiece to move it into the fixture. The system incorporates the dynamics simulation engine with the haptics interaction. The dynamics simulation engine uses a time stepping method with Guass-Seidel algorithm for resolving the forces on multiple contacts. The haptics interaction is performed in two modes: no contact mode and contact mode. To reach the high updating rate required for haptics simulation (1 KHz), we use two computers for the simulation, and the data is exchanged through a network connection. Examples show that the system can generate a physically plausible workpiece motion and reaction force for haptics simulation