Mechanical laws of motion were applied very early for better understanding anthropomorphic action as suggested in advance by Newton «For from hence are easily deduced the forces of machines, which are compounded of wheels, pullies, levers, cords, and weights, ascending directly or obliquely, and other mechanical powers; as also the force of the tendons to move the bones of animals». In the 19th century E.J. Marey and E. Muybridge introduced chronophotography to scientifically investigate animal and human movements. They opened the field of motion analysis by being the first scientists to correlate ground reaction forces with kinetics. Despite of the apparent simplicity of a given skilled movement, the organization of the underlying neuro-musculo-skeletal system remains unknown. A reason is the redundancy of the motor system: a given action can be realized by different muscle and joint activity patterns, and the same underlying activity may give rise to several movements. After the pioneering work of N. Bernstein in the 60’s on the existence of motor synergies, numerous researchers «walking on the border» of their disciplines tend to discover laws and principles underlying the human motions and how the brain reduces the redundancy of the system. These synergies represent the fundamental building blocks composing complex movements. In robotics, researchers face the same redundancy and complexity challenges as the researchers in life sciences. This book gathers works of roboticists and researchers in biomechanics in order to promote an interdisciplinary research on anthropomorphic systems at large and on humanoid robotics in particular.

Human-Like Biomechanics is a comprehensive introduction into modern geometrical methods to be used as a unified research approach in two apparently separate and rapidly growing fields: mathematical biomechanics and humanoid robotics. The book contains six Chapters and an Appendix. The first Chapter is an Introduction, giving a brief review of mathematical techniques to be used in the text. The second Chapter develops geometrical basis of human-like biomechanics, while the third Chapter develops its mechanical basis, mainly from generalized Lagrangian and Hamiltonian perspective. The fourth Chapter develops topology of human-like biomechanics, while the fifth Chapter reviews related nonlinear control techniques. The sixth Chapter develops covariant biophysics of electro-muscular stimulation. The Appendix consists of two parts: classical muscular mechanics and modern path integral methods, which are both used frequently in the main text. The whole book is based on the authors’ own research papers in human-like biomechanics.

This thesis proposes an original and interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of whole-body human movements through the synergistic utilization of biomechanics, motor control and robotics. Robust methods of biomechanics are used to record, process and analyze whole-body human motions. The Uncontrolled Manifold approach (UCM) of motor control is extended to study highly dynamic movements processed in the biomechanical study, in order to determine if hypothesized dynamic tasks are being controlled stably by the central nervous system. This extension permits also to infer a hierarchical organization of the controlled dynamic tasks. The task space formalism of motion generation in robotics is used to generate whole-body motion by taking into account the hierarchy of tasks extracted in the motor control study. This approach permits to better understand the organization of human dynamic motions and provide a new methodology to generate whole-body human motions with anthropomorphic systems. A case study of highly dynamic and complex movements of Parkour, including jumps and landings, is utilized to illustrate the proposed approach.

The book presents a new scientific approach to the problem of biomechanical systems description.This approach is based on development of a universal anthropomorphic model and employment of methodology of imitational dynamic modeling (IDM). The novelty of this approach is that there appears a possibility to operate with a whole class of models, derived from the universal model on the basis of motion separation principle. This is followed by utilization of iterational procedures realizing the method of successive approximations and resulting in description of the real motion with the pre-set accuracy level. By use of the IDM there has been for the first time ascertained certain laws governing human locomotions: presence of so-called controlling and stabilizing interlink moments, wavelike speeding of forces extremums along the kinematic chain, adaptation of control functions for astronauts motion coordination preservation. The book includes new theoretical conceptions explaining the deterioration of functional state of skeletal-muscular apparatus of astronauts due to zero-gravity influence.

The picture on the front cover of this book depicts a young man pulling a fishnet, a task of practical relevance for many centuries. It is a complex task, involving load transmission throughout the body, intricate balance, and eye head-hand coordination. The quest toward understanding how we perform such tasks with skill and grace, often in the presence of unpredictable pertur bations, has a long history. However, despite a history of magnificent sculptures and drawings of the human body which vividly depict muscle ac tivity and interaction, until more recent times our state of knowledge of human movement was rather primitive. During the past century this has changed; we now have developed a considerable database regarding the com position and basic properties of muscle and nerve tissue and the basic causal relations between neural function and biomechanical movement. Over the last few decades we have also seen an increased appreciation of the impor tance of musculoskeletal biomechanics: the neuromotor system must control movement within a world governed by mechanical laws. We have now col lected quantitative data for a wealth of human movements. Our capacity to understand the data we collect has been enhanced by our continually evolving modeling capabilities and by the availability of computational power. What have we learned? This book is designed to help synthesize our current knowledge regarding the role of muscles in human movement. The study of human movement is not a mature discipline.

The study of the mechanical design of living organisms is one of the most rapidly expanding areas of biological research. Greater understanding of the ways in which an animal's body responds to mechanical stress has resulted in significant advances in the fields of zoology, physiology, and biomedical engineering. This volume is the first to provide a compilation of experimental protocols for researchers in these areas. This detailed work evaluates the performance of structures within the musculoskeletal and circulatory systems in the context of their physical activities. Topics covered include: mechanical work in locomotion; aerodynamics of flight; in vivo measurement of bone strain and tendon force; hydrostatic skeletons and muscular hydrostats; and circulatory structure and mechanics. Biomechanics - Structure and Systems: A Practical Approach and its companion Biomechanics - Materials: A Practical Approach together provide a comprehensive resource of proven experimental protocols and expert guidance for researchers in zoology, physiology, biomedical engineering, and related fields.

This book presents the current state of the problem of describing the musculoskeletal system of a person. Models of the destruction of the endoskeleton and the restoration of its functions using exoskeleton are presented. A description is given of new approaches to modeling based on the use of weightless rods of variable length with concentrated masses. The practical application to the tasks of numerical simulation of the movements of the musculoskeletal system of a person is described. Exoskeleton models with variable-length units based on absolutely hard sections and sections that change their telescopic type length have been developed. The book is intended for specialists in the field of theoretical mechanics, biomechanics, robotics and related fields. The book will be useful to teachers, as well as graduate students, undergraduates and senior students of higher educational institutions, whose research interests lie in the modeling of anthropomorphic biomechanical systems.