A volumetric penetration measure for 6-DOF haptic rendering of streaming point clouds

We present a novel method to define the penetration volume between a surface point cloud and arbitrary 3D CAD objects. Moreover, we have developed a massively-parallel algorithm to compute this penetration measure efficiently on the GPU. The main idea is to represent the CAD object's volume by an inner bounding volume hierarchy while the point cloud does not require any additional data structures. Consequently, our algorithm is perfectly suited for streaming point clouds that can be gathered online via depth sensors like the Kinect. We have tested our algorithm in several demanding scenarios and our results show that our algorithm is fast enough to be applied to 6-DOF haptic rendering while computing continuous forces and torques.