Mathematical Model of a Horse and the Rider during a Jump

The horse-human interaction during horse riding is discussed here. The movements of a horse and its rider at trot are modeled by spring-damper-mass (SDM) models, which extracted the optimality of riding techniques in terms of the biomechanics. However, the models did not reproduce the trajectories at jump well because a trot is oscillatory while a jump is not. To improve the reproducibility of the trajectories at jump, we modified the existing SDM model for the horse at jump and evaluated the reproducibility of the models using the trajectories of the horse and the rider at canter and at jump, which are collected by tracking them in videos. As a result, our model succeeded to reproduce the trajectories at jump well.