Gregory S. Chirikjian
Professor Mechanical Engineering (secondary appointment in CS)
Johns Hopkins University

”Closed-Form Primitives for Generating Volume Preserving Deformations”

In this talk, methods for generating closed-form expressions for locally volume preserving deformations of general volumes in three  dimensional space are introduced. These methods have applications to computer aided geometric design, the mechanics of materials, and realistic real-time simulation and animation of physical processes. In mechanics, volume preserving deformations are intimately related to the conservation of mass. The importance of this fact manifests itself in design, and in the realistic simulation of many physical systems. Whereas volume preservation is generally written as a constraint on equations of motion in continuum mechanics, this talk develops a set of physically meaningful basic deformations which are intrinsically volume preserving.  By repeated application of these primitives, an infinite variety of deformations can be written in closed form. As time permits, we will also discuss metrics for rating how different two deformations are from one another.

References

Chirikjian, G.S. ``Closed-Form Primitives for Generating Volume Preserving Deformations." ASME Journal of Mechanical Design}. 117(Sept. 1995): 347-354.

Chirikjian, G.S., Zhou, S., ``Metrics on Motion and Deformation of Solid Models,''
ASME J. Mechanical Design, Vol. 120, No. 2, June, 1998, pp. 252-261.