Projects

This page describes of the currently underway at the ASL. We welcome any comments or offers of assistance! Click the images on the left for more information including animated sequences.

STOP PRESS: A new set of simulations will be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Wednesday 22nd August 2007. More details will be forthcoming when the media embargo is lifted.

Elastic Mechanisms

A current project is looking at the effects of elastic energy storage in large, bipedal dinosaurs. It also showcases a new simulator with much better ground interaction and the option for high quality output.

Agent Based Modelling

So far we have concentrated primarily on getting realistic movements and associated realistic metabolic costs. However we also need to generate appropriate behavioural repertoires if we want to achieve virtual world. For this reason we are starting to produce agent-based foraging models that can provide the motivation for moving our simulants through their environment.

Gibbon Brachiation

Our earliest simulant was actually a brachiator. This project was started and has been put on the back burner for the last few years. We have some kinematic data from zoo gibbons, some data from humans brachiating, and the beginnings of a simulator.

Climbing

Once you have a walking hominoid the next thing to consider is whether it can climb. This turns out to be very much trickier but we have a basic orang-utan model that can cling although it cannot make any upward progress yet.

Early Hominid Locomotion

This is an extension of the human simulant with limb dimensions scaled to match those of Australopithecus afarensis based on the AL-288-1 'Lucy' skeleton. This model can use either normal human-like gaits or more chimpanzee-like "Groucho' gaits and is able to calculate the cost of locomotion for these styles. It is also able to estimate the walk-run transition velocity and the speed/stride-length relationship.

Quadrupedalism

We have now produced a fully 3D quadrupedal simulant that can use all the standard symmetrical gaits (trotting, pacing and singlefooting). This opens up the way to investigate a much larger range of animals and questions including the role of gait choice and the evolution of tetrapod gaits.

Leaping

In the past we have done a great deal of work looking at the mechanics of leaping in prosimian primates including a very early simulator. We are now moving towards a field-biomechanics approach where we can use various forms of telemetry to analyse the locomotion of free-ranging animals.

Human Locomotion

Our earliest successful simulant was a human biped. This simulant is able to walk, run, skip and also a novel ankle-walking gait. The model is essentially 2D (although the Dynamechs simulator that it uses is fully 3D) and is currently relatively simple although we are currently working on adding additional muscles and extra segments to improve the biofidelity. The model is able to predict metabolic energy expenditures that match experimental values for walking at low speeds.

Dinosaur Locomotion

We have been spending the last year or so producing a model of Tyrannosaurus rex. This is very similar to the human biped but scaled to almost 6 tonnes and using appropriate joint angles. It produces very convincing running and we can calculate the power requirements and skeletal loading.