Research on Planar Development of Curved Surfaces

Development of curved surface is a useful tool in CAD(computer aided design) and CAGD(computer aided geometric design).This paper presents the algorithms for developing (flattening) a smooth continuous curved surface embedded in three dimensional space into a planar shape. First the definition of planar development of a curved surface is presented, and the distortions (at length and area) of development are discussed in this paper. Then several planar flattening methods of curved surface, and their advantages and disadvantages are analyzed in detail. For NURBS(non uniform rational basic spline) surfaces, which are broadly used in CAGD, we put forward a new planar developing algorithm, i.e. hybrid developing, and present the steps of the algorithm. At last, some examples are used to show the effectiveness of the algorithm.