Simulating the effects of fatigue and pathologies in gait

In this study, we propose a new method to simulate the effect of fatigue and pathologies in human gait motion. The method is based on Angular Momentum inducing inverted Pendulum Mode (AMPM), which is the enhanced version of 3D linear inverted pendulum mode that is used in robotics to generate biped locomotion. By importing the gait motion captured using a motion-capture device, the value of AMPM-parameters that define the trajectory of the center of mass and the angular momentum are calculated. By minimizing an objective function that takes into account the fatigue and disabilities of muscles, the original motion is converted to a new motion. Since the number of parameters to describe the motion is small in our method, the optimization process converges much more quickly than in previous methods.