Frequently Asked Questions

Musculoskeletal or biomechanical simulations aim to simulate movement of humans and animals. The main difference with simulation tools used in robotics is that musculoskeletal simulators include musculotendon actuators, which mimic the way in which muscles and tendons produce forces in nature. In addition, musculoskeletal simulators typically use non-rigid or force-based contacts to emulate the effect of soft-tissue.

The performance advantage of Hyfydy over OpenSim is mostly the result of using optimized algorithms and efficient software architecture. Hyfydy uses a custom algorithm to evaluate musculotendon dynamics that is orders of magnitude faster than the implementations in OpenSim. In addition, Hyfydy is optimized for use with small integration time steps, which are typically required with musculoskeletal simulations. These elements combined lead to a speedup of 50-100x over OpenSim, depending on which model is used.

* Optimization of a 10 second gait simulation, using a reflex-based controller [2] with hill-type musculotendon units [3] and non-linear contact forces [4]. Optimizations were performed in SCONE [5] using 1000 generations of CMA-ES [6] on a 4-core i7 Intel CPU.

* See details

At this moment, Hyfydy is only available as a plugin for SCONE. If you are interested in using Hyfydy for research in a different environment, please let us know.

Hyfydy is currently available for research applications only. Please contact us if you are interested in a commercial application.

Please contact us if you have a different question. We will try to get back to you as soon as possible.