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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gong, Haixin, Zhang, Chen, Sui, Yanan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11885
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author Gong, Haixin
Zhang, Chen
Sui, Yanan
author_facet Gong, Haixin
Zhang, Chen
Sui, Yanan
contents The human foot serves as the critical interface between the body and environment during locomotion. Existing musculoskeletal models typically oversimplify foot-ground contact mechanics, limiting their ability to accurately simulate human gait dynamics. We developed a novel contact-rich and deformable model of the human foot integrated within a complete musculoskeletal system that captures the complex biomechanical interactions during walking. To overcome the control challenges inherent in modeling multi-point contacts and deformable material, we developed a two-stage policy training strategy to learn natural walking patterns for this interface-enhanced model. Comparative analysis between our approach and conventional rigid musculoskeletal models demonstrated improvements in kinematic, kinetic, and gait stability metrics. Validation against human subject data confirmed that our simulation closely reproduced real-world biomechanical measurements. This work advances contact-rich interface modeling for human musculoskeletal systems and establishes a robust framework that can be extended to humanoid robotics applications requiring precise foot-ground interaction control.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_11885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contact-Rich and Deformable Foot Modeling for Locomotion Control of the Human Musculoskeletal System
Gong, Haixin
Zhang, Chen
Sui, Yanan
Robotics
The human foot serves as the critical interface between the body and environment during locomotion. Existing musculoskeletal models typically oversimplify foot-ground contact mechanics, limiting their ability to accurately simulate human gait dynamics. We developed a novel contact-rich and deformable model of the human foot integrated within a complete musculoskeletal system that captures the complex biomechanical interactions during walking. To overcome the control challenges inherent in modeling multi-point contacts and deformable material, we developed a two-stage policy training strategy to learn natural walking patterns for this interface-enhanced model. Comparative analysis between our approach and conventional rigid musculoskeletal models demonstrated improvements in kinematic, kinetic, and gait stability metrics. Validation against human subject data confirmed that our simulation closely reproduced real-world biomechanical measurements. This work advances contact-rich interface modeling for human musculoskeletal systems and establishes a robust framework that can be extended to humanoid robotics applications requiring precise foot-ground interaction control.
title Contact-Rich and Deformable Foot Modeling for Locomotion Control of the Human Musculoskeletal System
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11885