http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – In this paper, we propose a method for realtime estimation of whole-body muscle tensions. The main problem of muscle tension estimation is that there are infinite number of solutions to realize a particular joint torque due to the actuation redundancy. Numerical optimization techniques, e.g. quadratic programming, are often employed to obtain a unique solution, but they are usually computationally expensive. For example, our implementation of quadratic programming takes about 0.17 sec per frame on the musculoskeletal model with 274 elements, which is far from realtime computation. Read more »