Musculo-Skeletal Models of Human Movement: Tools to Quantify Embodiment

Human and animal movement is absolutely fascinating and can hardly be mimicked by technical devices, so far. It has been proposed that part of the movement generation and control can be attributed to the non-linear characteristics of the bio-mechanical structures and the morphology. Terms like morphological computation (Paul, 2006) and intelligence by mechanics (Blickhan et al., 2007) capture this idea. With the aid of computer simulations of human movement, we investigate the contribution of muscles and other structures to the movement generation.

The talk will present the simulation approach (multi-body Lagrange, muscle models, and neural motor control concept) and discuss methodical overlap with non-linear dynamics and information theory for the evaluation of the model results. Finally, some applications in medical engineering and automotive ergonomics will be presented.