Robot Kinematics and Dynamics for Modeling the Human Body

A body of effort has been devoted to developing efficient algorithms for kinematics and dynamics computation of robotic mechanisms, and has been successfully applied to control and simulation of complex mechanisms including industrial manipulators and humanoid robots. Thanks to such effort, as well as the recent progress in the computation power, it is becoming more realistic to apply these algorithms to human body dynamics modeling and simulation. On the other hand, the human body has a number of different properties from robotic systems in its complexity, actuators, and controllers. This paper describes our attempt towards building a precise human body dynamics model for its motion analysis and simulation. In particular, we present how the algorithms developed in robotics are combined with physiological models and data to address the difficulties of handling real human body.