BIPOP

The HuMAnS Toolbox

Features

Here is a brief presentation of the main features available in the HuMAnS toolbox. Note that due to its modular design and thanks to its Open Source GPLed distribution, everything is put in your hands for you to design new features to solve your own specific problems: this is essence of the "toolbox" approach.

Modeling

Several dynamic models are proposed in the distribution of the HuMAnS toolbox, with full geometry and mass distribution details:

an RX90 and a PA10 manipulator robots,
a Bip, a Kondo and a HRP2 humanoid robots (the HRP2 model is copyrighted and thus distributed only to people with appropriate licenses),
a sizable biomechanical model of a human being called Human36 for its 36 joint degrees of freedom.

On top of the basic mechanics of these models, the toolbox includes tools to compute various physical quantities attached to these models such as orientations, accelerations, positions of parts of these models that can be of specific interest for the simulation and analysis tools, for example for regulating the position of the end effector of a robot in the Cartesian space.

These models are distributed with full Maple sources, allowing to modify them or to generate new ones easily, either from the point of view of their mechanics or of the physical quantities attached to them that can be particular interest for a given application.

Different models of actuation of these articulated figures are available as well, ranging from classical sampled control laws with delay to elaborate muscle models with Functional Electric Stimulation, with once again full freedom to modify them at will within the scope of generic Hybrid Dynamical Systems (have a look at the scientific articles available in the documentation section for some details).

Simulation

One of the main features of the HuMAnS toolbox is to be able to handle simulations with non permanent contacts between the articulated figure and its environment. This is done through a Hybrid Dynamical System approach (have a look at the scientific articles available in the documentation section for some details). This allows considering events other than those only related to contact, such as for time-discretization of the control laws or for joint limits. Speaking about joint limits, note that the Human36 biomechanical model doesn't include any so far.

Reconstruction

With the help of a geometric model of a person (based on the Human36 model) and of a series of 3D markers attached to him, the HuMAnS toolbox offers tools to reconstruct the joint positions out of the positions of the markers, measured for example with a Vicon, a CODA or an OptoTrak system. A method mostly based so far on Nonlinear Least Squares.

Analysis

Any posture or motion, simulated or reconstructed, can be analyzed then within the scope of the usual Scilab shell, having full access to all the physical quantities attached previously to the model being considered, on top of all the classical numerical analysis tools generally available with such software. 3D Visualization is also possible either within Scilab for simple stick figures or with a VRML viewer for more comprehensive results (have a look at the Screenshots section).

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