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Optimization based muscle wrapping in biomechanical multibody simulations
Author(s) -
Penner Johann,
Leyendecker Sigrid
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
pamm
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1617-7061
DOI - 10.1002/pamm.201800311
Subject(s) - geodesic , context (archaeology) , work (physics) , multibody system , obstacle , biomechanics , path (computing) , anatomy , physics , computer science , classical mechanics , geometry , mathematics , geology , biology , paleontology , political science , law , thermodynamics , programming language
In musculoskeletal simulations muscle lengths and muscle force directions imply the characteristics of muscles acting around joints. Typically, the anatomical structure of the human body forces muscles to wrap around bones and neighboring tissue, thus most muscle paths cannot be represented adequately as straight lines. Therefore, biomechanical simulations require methods to compute musculotendon paths, their lengths, and their rates of length change to determine the muscle forces. This work focuses on a mechanical analogue to find the shortest path on general smooth surfaces, using a discrete variational principle. In this context, the geodesic path is reinterpreted as the constrained, force‐free motion of a particle in n dimensions. The muscle path is then a G1‐continuous combination of geodesics on adjacent obstacle surfaces [1,3,4].