Industrial design using interpolatory discrete developable surfaces

Design using free-form developable surfaces plays an important role in manufacturing industry. Currently most commercial systems can only support converting free-form surfaces into approximate developable surfaces. Direct design using developable surfaces by interpolating descriptive curves is much desired in industry. In this paper, by enforcing a propagation scheme and observing its nesting and recursive nature, a dynamic programming method is proposed for the design task of interpolating 3D boundary curves with a discrete developable surface. By using dynamic programming, the interpolatory discrete developable surface is obtained by globally optimizing an objective that minimizes tangent plane variations over a boundary triangulation. The proposed method is simple and effective to be used in industry. Experimental results are presented that demonstrate its practicality and efficiency in industrial design.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CAD
• Authors: Yong-Jin Liu, Kai Tang, Wen-Yong Gong, Tie-Ru Wu
• Keywords: Boundary Curves, CAD 2011, Developable Surface, Recursive Nature, Theoretical Computer Science