Haptic modeling as an integrating tool for product development

This paper presents an integrated system structure for product development. Haptic modeling, due to its growing applications to different aspects of product development, is envisioned as the core technology for the proposed product development system structure. Because of the fact that haptic modeling is developed based on physical laws, it is anticipated as the natural link between the virtual world and practical applications. Since haptic shape modeling is based on material properties and related shaping methods that require high update frequency, this paper also proposes an effective spatial run-length encoding (S-RLE) algorithm for 3D representations of both object shapes and shaping tools. Force measurements from a robot machining system are used to determine the coefficients of a simple machining force model.