CAIR Medtech Seminar #1 : Real-time contact simulations in large-scale problems
Interactive simulations applied in virtual surgery and robotics are usually required to predict the complex behavior of deformable objects and to provide relevant information for users in real-time. Therefore, real-time Finite Element (FE) simulations have to meet the antagonistic requirements of accuracy and fast computation time at the same time. One of the essential issues in interactive simulations is the presence of contact and friction. To solve the contact problem in coupled systems, constraint-based techniques have been shown to be accurate and robust, but come at a high computational cost. In this talk, we will discuss a novel method that efficiently addresses the problem using a mathematical reformulation and a GPU-based implementation. The method leverages reduced and parallelized computation, enabling the computing of the compliance matrix to no longer be a bottleneck in contact problems.