Haptic Rendering of Deformable Objects using a Multiple FPGA Parallel Computing Architecture

Behzad Mahdavikhah,  Ramin Mafi,  Shahin Sirouspour,  Nicola Nicolici
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada


Abstract

High-Fidelity simulations of haptic interaction with deformable objects is computationally challenging. In this paper, hardware- based parallel computing is proposed for Finite-element (FE) analysis of soft-object deformation models. A distributed implementation of the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) algorithms on N Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices can solve the large system of equations aris- ing from FE models at high update rates required for stable haptic interaction. Massive parallelization of the computa- tions is achieved by customizing the hardware architecture to the problem at hand and employing a large number of adaptive fixed-point computing units in parallel. An im- plementation of this scalable hardware accelerator on four Altera EP3SE110 FPGA devices is capable of performing 230.4 Giga Operations per second in Sparse Matrix by Vec- tor (SpMxV) multiplication. This architecture has success- fully enabled real-time simulation of haptic interaction with a 3-dimensional FE model of 6000 nodes. Both static and dynamics linear elastic models have been successfully simu- lated.