On the Historical Development of Human Walking Dynamics

Human walking is an interdisciplinary research topic. It started in the Ancient World with early observations and questions in philosophy, it was treated in the Middle Ages with experiments and data collection by physiologists, and in the 20th century models were designed, equations of motion were generated and simulations by multibody dynamics approaches were performed. More recently parameter optimization was used to overcome the problem of muscle overactuation and inverse dynamics methods were introduced. In the first part of the paper the early developments and mechanism models are described while in the second part parameter optimization is applied as an example of recent research results on gait disorder simulations.