Missions to small bodies in the solar system rely on accurate models of gravitation near the body. Present methods for calculating the gravitational force near a body are either inaccurate (e.g. Spherical Harmonics, mass cons), or computationally expensive (e.g. polyhedral methods). I am researching quick ways to compute the forces near a body that do not suffer the same inacurracies as previous methods.
A. Colombi, A. N. Hirani, B. F. Villac. "Adaptive Gravitational Force Representation for Fast Trajectory Propagation Near Small Bodies," submitted. [pdf]
A. Colombi, A. N. Hirani, B. F. Villac. "Efficient Gravity Field Computation For Trajectory Propagation Near Small Bodies," AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting, Sedona, Arizona. American Astronautical Society and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2007. [pdf]
Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) offer a compelling alternative to CPUs for many computationally intense tasks. My research in this area has focused on applications of GPU computing in astrodynamics.
Paper presented at the August 2007 Astrodynamics Specialist Conference shall appear shortly.
Following Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir's technique, Yuntao, Minhao and I developed an image resizing tool that preserves aspect ratio even when the target transformation does not.
Jim Jiao, Xinlai Ni, John Hart, and I developed a remeshing technique specialized for meshes that are being deformed. The work was presented at the International Meshing Roundtable 2006 in Birmingham Alabama. Jim Jiao gave the talk.
X. Jiao, A. Colombi, X. Ni, and J. Hart. "Anisotropic mesh adaptation for evolving triangulated surfaces," 15th International Meshing Roundtable, Birmingham AL, September 2006. [pdf]
Space is rife with Hamiltonian Systems: a mathematical object that describes the energy and motion of celestial bodies. Thus, simulating them has great practical value to scientists exploring our solar system. Recently (in math years, not computer science years) techniques used to simulate these systems have seen significant advances. So, I've been spending some time visiting old problems with new tools.
Here is a Ray Tracer I wrote for CS419. For more information and some generated images click here.
A game Ben Hilldore and I were developing for fun. When it is ready for a release I will probably post it here.