First order Hermite interpolation with spherical Pythagorean-hodograph curves (Q874327)

A Pythagorean curve \({\mathbf r}(t)\) in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) is one which satisfies \(\| {\mathbf r}\| ^2_2=\sigma(t)^2\) for some polynomial \(\sigma(t)\). A Pythagorean-hodograph (PH) curve is one whose hodograph \({\mathbf r}'\) is Pythagorean. The paper under review is devoted to study interpolation by means of PH curves. After extending the concept of PH curve to the case in which \(\sigma\) is a rational function, the authors introduce the general stereographic projection on a \(2\)-sphere with arbitrary radius, which is shown to be a PH preserving map in the sense that it maps a PH curve to another PH curve. Given \(C^1\) Hermite data, this result is applied to construct a spherical PH curve which is a \(C^1\) Hermite interpolation of the given data (Theorem 4). Some numerical results using Maple tools are given.