Dipartimento di Matematica

Abstract

We introduce the new class of planar Pythagorean-Hodograph (PH) B–Spline curves. They can be seen as a generalization of the well-known class of planar Pythagorean-Hodograph (PH) Bézier curves, presented by R. Farouki and T. Sakkalis in 1990, including the latter ones as special cases. Pythagorean-Hodograph B–Spline curves are nonuniform parametric B–Spline curves whose arc-length is a B–Spline function as well. An important consequence of this special property is that the offsets of Pythagorean-Hodograph B–Spline curves are non-uniform rational B–Spline (NURBS) curves. Thus, although Pythagorean-Hodograph B–Spline curves have fewer degrees of freedom than general B–Spline curves of the same degree, they offer unique advantages for computer-aided design and manufacturing, robotics, motion control, path planning, computer graphics, animation, and related fields. After providing a general definition for this new class of planar parametric curves, we !
present useful formulae for their construction and discuss their remarkable attractive properties. Then we provide a method to determine within the set of all PH B–Splines the one that is closest to a given reference spline having the same degree and knot partition.

Contact franca.calio@polimi.it