EMU: Efficient Muscle Simulation in Deformation Space

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.