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Drop Foot Gait Simulation

Project Description

For 16-868 Biomechanics & Motor Control, my team and I investigated simulated gait of a two-legged walker in MATLAB's Simulink. Our goal was to apply a drop foot injury to the model and generate a simulated gait that aligns with how drop foot gait presents in the real world. To this end, we started with a 2D muscular reflex model produced by Geyer and Herr in 2010, and gave it drop foot by reducing the maximum isometric force of its tibialis anterior to 33% of the healthy value. A covariance matrix adaptation evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES) was then employed to find a new set of control parameters that would allow the model to walk continuously.

A full writeup of the methods and results can be found here.

Gait of the healthy starting model can be seen in the following video:

Gait of our optimized drop-foot model can be seen in the following video: