Pedals are one of the important controls used in vehicles. Compared to hand controls, foot controls often restrict the posture of the user, and an inappropriate pedal design may contribute to muscle fatigue and cause discomfort for drivers. It is very important for engineers to be able to simulate realistic lower limb movements during a pedal control operation using a digital human model at the early stage of its design. Recently, the low-limb movements of clutch pedal operations were investigated experimentally (Wang et al, 2000), and a database was then created. In this paper, an inverse kinematics algorithm will be proposed to predict lower-limb pedal operation motion from the existing motion database. Emphasis will be put on how to keep a predicted motion similar to experimental observation and to satisfy the constraints imposed by the task and the environment at the same time.
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