Animal Simulation Laboratory

Fossils, Physics and Physiology

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Animal Simulation Laboratory

GaitSym V3.0.0

Friday, 28 October 2011 13:50 Bill Sellers
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BILL SELLERS

Gait Simulation using Multibody Dynamics

GaitSym is a forward dynamic modelling program. What that means is that you specify the forces and the program uses Newton's Laws to calculate the movements. It uses the Open Dynamics Engine physics library to do most of the hard work (opende.sourceforge.net) and provides a file format and display system so the user does not have to do any programming. It also provides various muscle models so that the forces can be generated directly from muscle activation levels and a number of hooks to allow it to be used with global optimisation tools such as genetic algorithms. The software is open source and is released under the GNU General Public License version 3.0 except for parts of the software that are covered by different licences (for example the OpenDE portions are covered by either Lesser GPL or a BSD license). If this license does not let you do what you want to do then please contact me and I am sure I can sort something out.

GaitSym 3.0.0 with Quad Chimp

Download

The following downloads are provided:

Last Updated on Friday, 28 October 2011 15:23 Read more...
 

Meet the Elephant Man - Patient Specific Gait Reconstruction

Thursday, 02 June 2011 18:41 administrator
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BILL SELLERS

As part of a programme for Discovery/Channel 4 we have been working on reconstructing the locomotion of Joseph Merrick, the famous Elephant Man of Victorian England. This was a very interesting project because the TV company had managed to obtain access to the skeleton and the wax body casts which they had both laser and CT scanned. These were then used to create a GaitSym model and we were able to use our standard genetic algorithm based optimisation techniques to recreate the way he might have walked.

Close of Joseph Merricks head and shoulders

Last Updated on Thursday, 02 June 2011 19:57 Read more...
 

Evolutionary Robotic Approaches in Primate Gait Analysis

Thursday, 25 March 2010 12:38 Bill Sellers
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BILL SELLERS

William Irvin Sellers & Todd C. Pataky & Paolo Caravaggi & Robin Huw Crompton (online published version) Evolutionary Robotic Approaches in Primate Gait Analysis. International Journal of Primatology DOI 10.1007/s10764-010-9396-4

This paper shows how important the Achilles tendon is for human running by creating computer simulations with and without the tendon. With the tendon running is both faster and more efficient! Interestingly chimpanzees and gorillas do not have this tendon (well they do, but it is too small to store any energy) and it is usually described as missing in orang-utans too. Strangely gibbons have a large Achilles tendon - perhaps to help them jump.

There are a set of models to go with this new paper. These work with GaitSym although rounding issues between different version of gcc mean that some of them fall over with the current version of GaitSym. However if you are developing running human models then these may be good starting points. You can also download a video of the simulation:

Last Updated on Thursday, 25 March 2010 14:02 Read more...
 

Hominoid Carrying Archive

Monday, 11 October 2010 15:54 administrator
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BILL SELLERS

This is a large collection of video data collected as part of a Natural Envir onment Research Council project (NERC 
NE/C520447/1 Hominoid energetics: could load carriage have driven the early adoption of bipedal locomotion in human evolution). It is described in Watson JC, Payne R, Chamberlain AC, Jones R, Sellers WI. The kinematics of load carrying in humans and great apes: implications for the evolution of human bipedalism. Folia Primatologia 2009 80:309-328. The video is in standard DX50 format with an AVI wrapper that should be readable by almost any video software. Basic joint centre motion capture was performed by hand for all the clips presented and this data is available too.

Sample stills from the video archive

Last Updated on Thursday, 02 June 2011 19:47 Read more...
 

Dinosaurs hop, skip and jump into 21st century

Tuesday, 01 December 2009 17:31 Bill Sellers
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Dinosaur locomotion: "Four legs good, two legs better?"

Everyone knows that dinosaurs come in all shapes and sizes. Most don't look like anything that's alive today and some are just plain bizarre. One group that fit this description well are the duck-billed dinosaurs (aka hadrosaurs). Along with the strange appearance (the eponymous duck-bill, peculiar skull ornaments, and long, slender forelimbs) scientists have argued about how they might have moved: Did they walk on four limbs, two limbs, or a combination of both depending on the speed? It has even been suggested that some may have hopped like a kangaroo!

 

Last Updated on Friday, 15 January 2010 15:10 Read more...
 
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