The HuMAnS Toolbox

About

What is the HuMAnS toolbox?

The Humanoid Motion Analysis and Simulation toolbox developed at the INRIA in Grenoble offers tools for the modeling, the control and the analysis of humanoid motion, being that of a robot or a human. It is already used in the BIPOP team in Grenoble, in the DEMAR team in Montpellier, at the LMS in Poitiers, at the JRL in Japan for applications on the Bip and the HRP-2 humanoid robots as well as in biomechanics, for the Functional Electric Stimulation of paralyzed muscles and in neurophysiology.

It is mainly developed by members of the BIPOP team at the INRIA, and works successfully on Windows, MacOS X and Linux computers. Please check the Documentation section for more details.

Motivations

As soon as one is interested in the simulation and analysis of humanoid motion, one major scientific and technical difficulty lies in the non permanent contact between the feet and the ground and more generally between the humanoid and its environment. The numerical analysis of non permanent contact is still an open problem from the point of view of theory and even more from the point of view of software availability. Indeed, rare are the mechanical simulation software available today, either academic or commercial, that can be considered to propose correct and efficient solutions in situations of non permanent contact. This is one major focus of the HuMAnS toolbox.

Then, numerical tools for the analysis of the stability of humanoid motion, for generating postures, trajectories and control laws need to rely on state of the art analytical models of both the humanoid figures and the different tasks that need to be realized. Commercial software exist for generating analytical models of mechanical systems, such as SD/FAST, distributed by Parametric Technology Corporation, or SYMORO+, developed by the Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes, but these are closed tools which do not allow to manipulate more thoroughly the resulting mechanical models and generate additional models of the tasks to be realized. The lack of such open modular analysis tools motivated us in developing the HuMAnS software, a toolbox specifically designed for Humanoid Motion Analysis and Simulation which appears to be unique so far.

Required software

The simulation, the control and the analysis tools in HuMAnS are based on Scilab, a free Matlab clone developed at the INRIA. The model generation uses Maple to generate C code. Maple and a C compiler are necessary therefore if AND ONLY IF you want to create new models or modify those already included in HuMAnS. Then, the posture generator specifically needs the optimization algorithm FSQP which can be obtained (free for academics) from AEMDesign.

In conclusion, for most uses of the HuMAnS toolbox, the only required software is:

• Scilab 4.0

• Maple for the model generation,
• a C compiler like gcc for Unix or MacOS, or Visual.net for Windows systems to compile the C code produced by Maple,
• FSQP 1.2 for the posture generation.

GPL License

This software is Copyright (C) INRIA

It is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

We would prefer however that any interested person asks for this software directly by email to humans-devel@inrialpes.fr precising his/her name, institution and use of the HuMAnS toolbox.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
Downloading this software means that you accept the conditions of this License and that you are bound to respect them.