The Multi-Rigid-Body Modeling and Gait Simulation for Human Foot Kinematics

To investigate the motor function of human foot and its effect on stability in walking, the paper built a multi-rigid-body model of human lower limb and realized its kinematic simulation of human walking, with emphasis on the anatomy, modeling and kinematics of the foot. The model was composed of the realistic model of foot skeleton and simplified models of other part of human body with proper ratio of dimension. It simulated human walking with the angular displacement of joints and the trajectory of center of upper body mass block defined. The significance of the work is that it could provide the comprehensive foot kinematics data which is crucial for the further dynamic analysis of the foot in walking and is difficult to obtain. The paper proposed to judge the simulation distortion based on the displacement and the contact style between foot and ground, and to approximate the more accurate description of the foot joints movement by minimizing the walking simulation distortion under the constraints of the lower limb model. It is unique in the design of the motion transmit chain, the flexible application of the model, and the way to use the optimization method to approximate the more accurate kinematic model of foot and to minimize the simulation distortion.