Climbing Simulation

This simulant is based on a fuly laser scanned orang-utan skeleton. This is an excellent way of building a model if you can get hold of the material. You can very clealy see where to put muscles and you do not get the left-right confusion that is so easy when all the segments are represented by cylinders. The hands and the ladder use multiple contact elements to prevent interpenetration and to allow the simulant to climb. One of the difficulties with our climbing simulant is that there are not any really good theoretical models to base the movements on (there are static climbing models but that does not really help). This made generating a suitable pattern very tricky although we do now have some ideas and this project will definitely get another airing at some time in the future to see if we can do rather better.

You can see the current state of play from the following video clip: