A modular and efficient approach to computational modeling and sensitivity analysis of robot and human motion dynamics

Abstract

In this paper a new class library for the computation of the forward multi-body-system (MBS) dynamics of robots and biomechanical models of human motion is presented. By the developed modular modeling approach the library can be flexibly extended by specific modeling elements like joints with specific geometry or different muscle models and thus can be applied efficiently for a number of dynamic simulation and optimization problems. The library not only provides several methods for solving the forward dynamics problem (like articulated body or composite rigid body algorithms) which can transparently be exchanged. Moreover, the numerical solution of optimal control problems, like in the forward dynamics optimization of human motion, is significantly facilitated by the computation of the sensitivity matrix with respect to the control variables.Examples are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.

Analyzing and considering inertial effects in powered lower limb prosthetic design

“…The biomechanical model for the inverse dynamics simulation that calculates the knee torques τ k for given joint and ground reaction force trajectories is implemented as a multi-body system within the object-oriented class library MBSLIB [18], [21]. MBSLIB applies the recursive Newton-Euler algorithm [22] to compute inverse dynamics.…”