Control of walking direction on the CPG-based neuro-musculo-skeletalwalking model

Abstract

Human motion analysis is an important technology for a number of applications, such as sports science, life- support engineering, computer graphics and robotics. In previous research, dynamics analysis on human motions has been studied with musculo-skeletal models. Moreover, it is well known that a rhythmic pattern generator activates muscles, which is called central pattern generator (CPG). There are a lot of studies on neuro-musculo-skeletal (NMS) models in which the CPG and musculo-skeletal model are integrated. Although forward dynamics simulations were conducted on straight walking motions in those research, it is also important to extend the NMS model to three dimensional motions with the walking direction changing, such as a turn or curve walk. In this paper, we present a walking direction control on the NMS model by the coordinate transformation of the somatosensory information. The validity is verified with simulations on a turn walk and curve walk.