Multi-Domain Simulation of Human Mechanics for Dynamic Analysis

Digital human models (DHM) offer a great possibility of design evaluation for products humans interact with. One field to apply DMH’s is the dynamic analysis of human-machine interaction. Thereby, the dynamics of the human body can significantly influence the entire system behavior and thus it is important to consider during the design process. For the modeling language Modelica no simulation library for this application is available, so far. The language is especially suitable for the simulation across different domains, which makes a DHM in Modelica useful. In this paper a DHM predicting the dynamic behavior of the human body during human-machine interaction is implemented in Modelica. It consists of a multi-body skeleton model, an inverse kinematics algorithm for the limbs and a controller for the skeleton joints inspired by human motor control. The capability of the proposed simulation approach to take the relevant dynamical properties of the human body and motor control into account is demonstrated in a use-case simulation. As use-case the aircraft-pilot coupling during a strong gust acting on a sports aircraft is investigated.