Trimming self-intersections in swept volume solid modeling

Abstract

Swept volume solid modeling has been applied to many areas such as NC machining simulation and verification, robot workspace analysis, collision detection, and CAD. But self-intersections continue to be a challenging problem in the boundary representation of swept volume solids. A novel algorithm is presented in this paper to trim self-intersection regions in swept volume solids modeling. This trimming algorithm consists of two major steps: (1) roughly detecting self-intersection regions by checking intersections or overlapping of the envelop profiles; (2) splitting the whole envelop surfaces of the swept volume solid into separate non-self-intersecting patches to trim global self-intersections, and to trim local self-intersections, dividing local self-intersecting regions into patches and replacing self-intersecting patches with non-self-intersecting ones. Examples show that our algorithm is efficient and robust.