Digital Human Modeling: Kinematics and Statics

Abstract

Digital human modeling has become an active research and development field since 1980’s [1]-[9]. The primary applications include engineering design and validation, digital ergonomic assessment and evaluation, digital simulation and verification of product design and assembling, etc. In history, to simulate a human and motion in a digital environment, people often hired a real person and installed a number of sensors, called a flog of birds, over the entire human body for motion captures. In other words, each sensor would be capable of sensing and transmitting a 3D-coordinate signal at each time instant, and generate a sequence of points as a trajectory by a recorder or a camera. If all the sensors are installed to cover every major marker point over the human body, then a complete motion is captured and ready to playback in a computer. Therefore, the motion capture can reproduce a realistic motion and most Hollywood computer-created movies are made by this technology. The drawback is obvious that each capture can record and generate only one single motion, and has to capture another live motion again for any update or change.