Contact-Rich and Deformable Foot Modeling for Locomotion Control of the Human Musculoskeletal System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deformable, contact-rich foot model for human gait simulation, improving accuracy over traditional models and validated against real human data, with potential applications in robotics.

Contribution

It presents a new deformable foot model integrated into musculoskeletal simulations and a two-stage policy training method for realistic gait control.

Findings

Enhanced gait stability metrics compared to rigid models

Closer match to human biomechanical data

Improved simulation accuracy of foot-ground interactions

Abstract

The human foot serves as the critical interface between the body and environment during locomotion. Existing musculoskeletal models typically oversimplify foot-ground contact mechanics, limiting their ability to accurately simulate human gait dynamics. We developed a novel contact-rich and deformable model of the human foot integrated within a complete musculoskeletal system that captures the complex biomechanical interactions during walking. To overcome the control challenges inherent in modeling multi-point contacts and deformable material, we developed a two-stage policy training strategy to learn natural walking patterns for this interface-enhanced model. Comparative analysis between our approach and conventional rigid musculoskeletal models demonstrated improvements in kinematic, kinetic, and gait stability metrics. Validation against human subject data confirmed that our simulation closely reproduced real-world biomechanical measurements. This work advances contact-rich interface modeling for human musculoskeletal systems and establishes a robust framework that can be extended to humanoid robotics applications requiring precise foot-ground interaction control.