EMU: Efficient Muscle Simulation In Deformation Space

TL;DR

EMU is a scalable, efficient muscle simulation model that accurately captures musculoskeletal motion with heterogeneous materials, outperforming FEM in speed and flexibility without sacrificing visual accuracy.

Contribution

EMU introduces a novel simulation approach that avoids model reductions, handles heterogenous materials, and scales efficiently compared to traditional FEM methods.

Findings

EMU produces visually accurate results compared to FEM.

EMU scales better than FEM with mesh complexity.

EMU can simulate muscles, tendons, bones, and joints within a unified system.

Abstract

EMU is an efficient and scalable model to simulate bulk musculoskeletal motion with heterogenous materials. First, EMU requires no model reductions, or geometric coarsening, thereby producing results visually accurate when compared to an FEM simulation. Second, EMU is efficient and scales much better than state-of-the-art FEM with the number of elements in the mesh, and is more easily parallelizable. Third, EMU can handle heterogeneously stiff meshes with an arbitrary constitutive model, thus allowing it to simulate soft muscles, stiff tendons and even stiffer bones all within one unified system. These three key characteristics of EMU enable us to efficiently orchestrate muscle activated skeletal movements. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach via a number of examples with tendons, muscles, bones and joints.