ABSTRACT
A mathematical model of the human body comprising 23 degrees of freedom and 54 muscles is used to solve an optimal control problem for jumping in three dimensions. The optimal control solution was computed on an IBM SP2 parallel supercomputer located at NASA Ames Research Center in California. The computational performance of the SP2 is far better than that of other parallel machines such as the Connection Machine CM-5. The predicted ground-reaction forces, body-segmental motions, and muscle activation patterns agree closely with measurements of the same variables obtained for maximum-height human jumping.
