Hill’s and Huxley’s Muscle Models – Tools for Simulations in Biomechanics

Abstract

Numerous mathematical models of human skeletal muscles have been developed. However, none of them is adopted as a general one and each of them is suggested for some specific purpose. This topic is essential in humanoid robotics, since we firstly need to understand how human moves and acts in order to exploit human movement patterns in robotics and design human like actuators. Simulations in biomechanics are intensively used in research of locomotion, safe human-robot interaction, development of novel robotic actuators, biologically inspired control algorithms, etc. This paper presents two widely adopted muscle models (Hill’s and Huxley’s model), elaborates their features and demonstrates trade-off between their accuracy and efficiency of computer simulations. The simulation setup contains mathematical representation of passive muscle structures as well as mathematical model of an elastic tendon as a series elastic actuation element. Advanced robot control techniques point out energy consumption as one of the key issues. Therefore, energy store and release mechanism in elastic elements in both tendon and muscle, based on the simulation models, are considered.