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Liang Ma

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Published work

34 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Mamoda2.5: Enhancing Unified Multimodal Model with DiT-MoE

We present Mamoda2.5, a unified AR-Diffusion framework that seamlessly integrates multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture. To efficiently enhance the model's generation capability, we equip the Diffusion Transformer backbone with a fine-grained Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design (128 experts, Top-8 routing), yielding a 25B-parameter model that activates only 3B parameters, significantly reducing training costs while scaling up the model capacity. Mamoda2.5 achieves top-tier generation performance on VBench 2.0 and sets a new record in video editing quality, surpassing evaluated open-source models and matching the performance of current top-tier proprietary models, including the Kling O1 on OpenVE-Bench. Furthermore, we introduce a joint few-step distillation and reinforcement learning framework that compresses the 30-step editing model into a 4-step model and greatly accelerates model inference. Compared to open-source baselines, Mamoda2.5 achieves up to $95.9\times$ faster video editing inference. In real-world applications, Mamoda2.5 has been successfully deployed for content moderation and creative restoration tasks in advertising scenarios, achieving a 98% success rate in internal advertising video editing scenario.

preprint2025arXiv

Deep Deterministic Nonlinear ICA via Total Correlation Minimization with Matrix-Based Entropy Functional

Blind source separation, particularly through independent component analysis (ICA), is widely utilized across various signal processing domains for disentangling underlying components from observed mixed signals, owing to its fully data-driven nature that minimizes reliance on prior assumptions. However, conventional ICA methods rely on an assumption of linear mixing, limiting their ability to capture complex nonlinear relationships and to maintain robustness in noisy environments. In this work, we present deep deterministic nonlinear independent component analysis (DDICA), a novel deep neural network-based framework designed to address these limitations. DDICA leverages a matrix-based entropy function to directly optimize the independence criterion via stochastic gradient descent, bypassing the need for variational approximations or adversarial schemes. This results in a streamlined training process and improved resilience to noise. We validated the effectiveness and generalizability of DDICA across a range of applications, including simulated signal mixtures, hyperspectral image unmixing, modeling of primary visual receptive fields, and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that DDICA effectively separates independent components with high accuracy across a range of applications. These findings suggest that DDICA offers a robust and versatile solution for blind source separation in diverse signal processing tasks.

preprint2025arXiv

Quadratic Curvature Correction to 5D Myers-Perry Metric

We consider quadratic curvature perturbation to the Myers-Perry black hole in five dimensions at the linear level in the coupling constant. The solution can then be solved order by order in terms of two dimensionless angular momentum parameters up to an arbitrary order. We present the results up to tenth order. The perturbed solution allows us to obtain the higher-derivative correction to the black hole thermodynamics, which we find is in complete agreement with the Reall-Santos method.

preprint2023arXiv

Dyonic Black Strings and the Charge Lattice in Salam-Sezgin model

We obtain a class of dyonic black string solutions in 6D Salam-Sezgin model. We then calculate various thermodynamic quantities associated with this solution. Interestingly, for the thermodynamic quantities to be well defined, the temperature is bounded from above. However, the mass and entropy can still grow without any upper bound, reaching infinity at the maximal temperature. The quantization condition obeyed by various charges is also analyzed. In particular, we find that the Dirac quantization condition selects one particular sign choice for the magnetic string charges.

preprint2023arXiv

Quantum Corrections to Pair Production of Charged Black Holes in de Sitter Space

We compute Euclidean action of charged de Sitter black holes in four dimensional gravitational Euler-Heisenberg model. It turns out that the action of a general Euclidean dyonically charged black hole is still controlled by the total entropy contributed by the black hole outer horizon and the cosmological horizon. For smooth configurations, the Euclidean action can be interpreted as the black hole production rate in de Sitter space. We show that the 4-derivative couplings break the symmetry between the production rate of the purely electric black hole and that of the purely magnetic black hole. Although electromagnetic duality is no longer a symmetry, it induces a transformation on the 4-derivative couplings, mapping the physical quantities of a purely electric black hole to those of a purely magnetic black hole and vice versa. We also observe that under the same transformation, unitarity constraints on the 4-derivative couplings remain invariant.

preprint2022arXiv

$α'$-corrections to Near Extremal Dyonic Strings and Weak Gravity Conjecture

We construct non-extremal dyonic string solutions in 6D minimal supergravity where the leading higher derivative corrections arise from either the type IIA string theory compactified on K3 or the heterotic string theory compactified on 4-torus. The thermodynamical quantities and Euclidean actions of the strings are computed. In the near extremal regime, we calculate the force felt by a probe fundamental string in the background of the macroscopic dyonic string with leading $α'$ corrections. We find that in both the IIA and heterotic setups, away from extremality, the attractive force overwhelms the repulsive force. However, close to extremality, the $α'$ corrections can reduce the attractive force in the isoentropic process, where the charges are fixed. This feature may be used as a new constraint for supergravity models with consistent quantum gravity embedding, in cases where the extremal limit coincides with the BPS limit and the higher derivative corrections do not affect the mass-to-charge ratio. By contrast, the $α'$ corrections can enhance the attractive force in the isothermal or isoenergetic processes.

preprint2022arXiv

A new simple dynamic muscle fatigue model and its validation

Musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) is one of the major health problems in physical work especially in manual handling jobs. In several literatures, muscle fatigue is considered to be closely related to MSD, especially for muscle related disorders. In addition to many existing analysis techniques for muscle fatigue assessment and MSD risk analysis, in this paper, a new muscle fatigue model was proposed. The new proposed model reflects the influence of external load, workload history, and individual differences. This model is simple in mathematics and can be easily applied in realtime calculation, such as the application in realtime virtual work simulation and evaluation. The new model was mathematically validated with 24 existing static models by comparing the calculated METs, and qualitatively or quantitatively validated with 3 existing dynamic models. The proposed model shows high or moderate similarities in predicting the METs with all the 24 static models. Validation results with the three dynamic models were also promising. The main limitation of the model is that it still lacks experimental validation for more dynamic situations. Relevance to industry Muscle fatigue is one of the main reasons causing MSDs in industry, especially for physical work. Correct evaluation of muscle fatigue is necessary to determine work-rest regimens and reduce the risks of MSD.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep Transfer Learning with Graph Neural Network for Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition

The sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) in mobile application scenarios is often confronted with sensor modalities variation and annotated data deficiency. Given this observation, we devised a graph-inspired deep learning approach toward the sensor-based HAR tasks, which was further used to build a deep transfer learning model toward giving a tentative solution for these two challenging problems. Specifically, we present a multi-layer residual structure involved graph convolutional neural network (ResGCNN) toward the sensor-based HAR tasks, namely the HAR-ResGCNN approach. Experimental results on the PAMAP2 and mHealth data sets demonstrate that our ResGCNN is effective at capturing the characteristics of actions with comparable results compared to other sensor-based HAR models (with an average accuracy of 98.18% and 99.07%, respectively). More importantly, the deep transfer learning experiments using the ResGCNN model show excellent transferability and few-shot learning performance. The graph-based framework shows good meta-learning ability and is supposed to be a promising solution in sensor-based HAR tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning by Sampling Multi-Phase Tasks

New classes arise frequently in our ever-changing world, e.g., emerging topics in social media and new types of products in e-commerce. A model should recognize new classes and meanwhile maintain discriminability over old classes. Under severe circumstances, only limited novel instances are available to incrementally update the model. The task of recognizing few-shot new classes without forgetting old classes is called few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL). In this work, we propose a new paradigm for FSCIL based on meta-learning by LearnIng Multi-phase Incremental Tasks (LIMIT), which synthesizes fake FSCIL tasks from the base dataset. The data format of fake tasks is consistent with the `real' incremental tasks, and we can build a generalizable feature space for the unseen tasks through meta-learning. Besides, LIMIT also constructs a calibration module based on transformer, which calibrates the old class classifiers and new class prototypes into the same scale and fills in the semantic gap. The calibration module also adaptively contextualizes the instance-specific embedding with a set-to-set function. LIMIT efficiently adapts to new classes and meanwhile resists forgetting over old classes. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200) and large-scale dataset, i.e., ImageNet ILSVRC2012 validate that LIMIT achieves state-of-the-art performance.

preprint2022arXiv

Forward Compatible Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Novel classes frequently arise in our dynamically changing world, e.g., new users in the authentication system, and a machine learning model should recognize new classes without forgetting old ones. This scenario becomes more challenging when new class instances are insufficient, which is called few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL). Current methods handle incremental learning retrospectively by making the updated model similar to the old one. By contrast, we suggest learning prospectively to prepare for future updates, and propose ForwArd Compatible Training (FACT) for FSCIL. Forward compatibility requires future new classes to be easily incorporated into the current model based on the current stage data, and we seek to realize it by reserving embedding space for future new classes. In detail, we assign virtual prototypes to squeeze the embedding of known classes and reserve for new ones. Besides, we forecast possible new classes and prepare for the updating process. The virtual prototypes allow the model to accept possible updates in the future, which act as proxies scattered among embedding space to build a stronger classifier during inference. FACT efficiently incorporates new classes with forward compatibility and meanwhile resists forgetting of old ones. Extensive experiments validate FACT's state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhoudw-zdw/CVPR22-Fact

preprint2022arXiv

Self-distilled Knowledge Delegator for Exemplar-free Class Incremental Learning

Exemplar-free incremental learning is extremely challenging due to inaccessibility of data from old tasks. In this paper, we attempt to exploit the knowledge encoded in a previously trained classification model to handle the catastrophic forgetting problem in continual learning. Specifically, we introduce a so-called knowledge delegator, which is capable of transferring knowledge from the trained model to a randomly re-initialized new model by generating informative samples. Given the previous model only, the delegator is effectively learned using a self-distillation mechanism in a data-free manner. The knowledge extracted by the delegator is then utilized to maintain the performance of the model on old tasks in incremental learning. This simple incremental learning framework surpasses existing exemplar-free methods by a large margin on four widely used class incremental benchmarks, namely CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset, Caltech-101 and Flowers-102. Notably, we achieve comparable performance to some exemplar-based methods without accessing any exemplars.

preprint2021arXiv

Making artificial $\textit{p}_{x,y}$-orbital honeycomb electron lattice on metal surface

We theoretically demonstrate that the desired $p_{x,y}$-orbital honeycomb electron lattice can be readily realized by arranging CO molecules into a hexagonal lattice on Cu(111) surface with scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). The electronic structure of the Cu surface states in the presence of CO molecules is calculated with various methods, \textit{i.e.}~DFT simulations, muffin-tin potential model and tight-binding model. Our calculations indicate that, by measuring the LDOS pattern using STM, the $p$-orbital surface bands can be immediately identified in experiment. We also give an analytic interpretation of the $p$-orbital LDOS pattern with $k \cdot p$ method. Meanwhile, different from the case of graphene, the $p$-orbital honeycomb lattice has two kinds of edge states, which can also be directly observed in STM experiment. Our work points out a feasible way to construct a $p_{x,y}$-orbital honeycomb electron lattice in a real system, which may have exotic properties, such as Wigner crystal, ferromagnetism, $f$-wave superconductivity, quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect. Furthermore, we also propose a simple way to calculate and identify the modified Cu surface bands in the Cu/CO systems with the DFT simulations. Considering the recent works about $p$-orbital square lattice in similar systems [M. R. Slot, \textit{et al.} Nat. Phys. \textbf{13}, 672 (2017); Liang Ma, \textit{et al.} Phys. Rev. B \textbf{99}, 205403 (2019)], our work once again illustrates that the artificial electron lattice on metal surface is an ideal platform to study the orbital physics in a controllable way.

preprint2020arXiv

Experimental Syntheses of Sodalite-like Clathrate EuH$_6$ and EuH$_9$ at Extreme Pressures

The recent discovery of a class of sodalite-like clathrate superhydrides (e.g., YH6, YH9, ThH9, ThH10, and LaH10) at extreme pressures, which exhibit commonly a high-temperature superconductivity with the highest Tc approaching 260 K for LaH10, opened up a new era in search of high-temperature superconductors in metal superhydrides. There is a high interest towards the finding of alternative clathrate superhydrides that might witness the long-dreamed room-temperature superconductivity. Here, we target on the experimental synthesis of strongly-correlated europium (Eu) superhydrides where theory can fail for the prediction of superconductivity. We pressurized and laser-heated the mixture of metal Eu and ammonia borane (NH3BH3) in a diamond anvil cell and successfully synthesized the sodalite-like clathrate EuH6 and EuH9 at conditions of 152 GPa and 1,700 K, and 170 GPa and 2,800 K, respectively. Two non-clathrate structured phases of EuH5 and EuH6 were also synthesized that are not reported in lanthanide superhydrides. Calculated large H-derived electronic density of states at the Fermi level in clathrate EuH6 implies the potential of high temperature superconductivity. Our work created a model superhydride platform for subsequent investigation on how strongly-correlated effect in electronic structure can affect the superconductivity of superhydrides, a phenomenon that is not known thus far.

preprint2020arXiv

IROS 2019 Lifelong Robotic Vision Challenge -- Lifelong Object Recognition Report

This report summarizes IROS 2019-Lifelong Robotic Vision Competition (Lifelong Object Recognition Challenge) with methods and results from the top $8$ finalists (out of over~$150$ teams). The competition dataset (L)ifel(O)ng (R)obotic V(IS)ion (OpenLORIS) - Object Recognition (OpenLORIS-object) is designed for driving lifelong/continual learning research and application in robotic vision domain, with everyday objects in home, office, campus, and mall scenarios. The dataset explicitly quantifies the variants of illumination, object occlusion, object size, camera-object distance/angles, and clutter information. Rules are designed to quantify the learning capability of the robotic vision system when faced with the objects appearing in the dynamic environments in the contest. Individual reports, dataset information, rules, and released source code can be found at the project homepage: "https://lifelong-robotic-vision.github.io/competition/".

preprint2020arXiv

Neural Network Tomography

Network tomography, a classic research problem in the realm of network monitoring, refers to the methodology of inferring unmeasured network attributes using selected end-to-end path measurements. In the research community, network tomography is generally investigated under the assumptions of known network topology, correlated path measurements, bounded number of faulty nodes/links, or even special network protocol support. The applicability of network tomography is considerably constrained by these strong assumptions, which therefore frequently position it in the theoretical world. In this regard, we revisit network tomography from the practical perspective by establishing a generic framework that does not rely on any of these assumptions or the types of performance metrics. Given only the end-to-end path performance metrics of sampled node pairs, the proposed framework, NeuTomography, utilizes deep neural network and data augmentation to predict the unmeasured performance metrics via learning non-linear relationships between node pairs and underlying unknown topological/routing properties. In addition, NeuTomography can be employed to reconstruct the original network topology, which is critical to most network planning tasks. Extensive experiments using real network data show that comparing to baseline solutions, NeuTomography can predict network characteristics and reconstruct network topologies with significantly higher accuracy and robustness using only limited measurement data.

preprint2020arXiv

State Action Separable Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods have seen their paramount successes in solving serial decision-making and control problems in recent years. For conventional RL formulations, Markov Decision Process (MDP) and state-action-value function are the basis for the problem modeling and policy evaluation. However, several challenging issues still remain. Among most cited issues, the enormity of state/action space is an important factor that causes inefficiency in accurately approximating the state-action-value function. We observe that although actions directly define the agents' behaviors, for many problems the next state after a state transition matters more than the action taken, in determining the return of such a state transition. In this regard, we propose a new learning paradigm, State Action Separable Reinforcement Learning (sasRL), wherein the action space is decoupled from the value function learning process for higher efficiency. Then, a light-weight transition model is learned to assist the agent to determine the action that triggers the associated state transition. In addition, our convergence analysis reveals that under certain conditions, the convergence time of sasRL is $O(T^{1/k})$, where $T$ is the convergence time for updating the value function in the MDP-based formulation and $k$ is a weighting factor. Experiments on several gaming scenarios show that sasRL outperforms state-of-the-art MDP-based RL algorithms by up to $75\%$.

preprint2020arXiv

Synetgy: Algorithm-hardware Co-design for ConvNet Accelerators on Embedded FPGAs

Using FPGAs to accelerate ConvNets has attracted significant attention in recent years. However, FPGA accelerator design has not leveraged the latest progress of ConvNets. As a result, the key application characteristics such as frames-per-second (FPS) are ignored in favor of simply counting GOPs, and results on accuracy, which is critical to application success, are often not even reported. In this work, we adopt an algorithm-hardware co-design approach to develop a ConvNet accelerator called Synetgy and a novel ConvNet model called DiracDeltaNet$^{\dagger}$. Both the accelerator and ConvNet are tailored to FPGA requirements. DiracDeltaNet, as the name suggests, is a ConvNet with only $1\times 1$ convolutions while spatial convolutions are replaced by more efficient shift operations. DiracDeltaNet achieves competitive accuracy on ImageNet (88.7\% top-5), but with 42$\times$ fewer parameters and 48$\times$ fewer OPs than VGG16. We further quantize DiracDeltaNet's weights to 4-bit and activations to 4-bits, with less than 1\% accuracy loss. These quantizations exploit well the nature of FPGA hardware. In short, DiracDeltaNet's small model size, low computational OP count, low precision and simplified operators allow us to co-design a highly customized computing unit for an FPGA. We implement the computing units for DiracDeltaNet on an Ultra96 SoC system through high-level synthesis. Our accelerator's final top-5 accuracy of 88.1\% on ImageNet, is higher than all the previously reported embedded FPGA accelerators. In addition, the accelerator reaches an inference speed of 66.3 FPS on the ImageNet classification task, surpassing prior works with similar accuracy by at least 11.6$\times$.

preprint2020arXiv

Vacua and Exact Solutions in Lower-$D$ Limits of EGB

We consider the action principles that are the lower dimensional limits of the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity {\it via} the Kaluza-Klein route. We study the vacua and obtain some exact solutions. We find that the reality condition of the theories may select one vacuum over the other from the two vacua that typically arise in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity. We obtain exact black hole and cosmological solutions carrying scalar hair, including scalar hairy BTZ black holes with both mass and angular momentum turned on. We also discuss the holographic central charges in the asymptotic AdS backgrounds.

preprint2019arXiv

Bounds on Photon Spheres and Shadows of Charged Black Holes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet-Maxwell Gravity

We consider spherically symmetric and static charged black holes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet-Maxwell gravities in general $D\ge 5$ dimensions and study their photon spheres and black hole shadows. We show that they all satisfy the sequence of inequalities recently proposed relating a black hole's horizon, photon sphere, shadow and its mass.

preprint2019arXiv

Holographic Complexity Bounds

We study the action growth rate in the Wheeler-DeWitt (WDW) patch for a variety of $D\ge 4$ black holes in Einstein gravity that are asymptotic to the anti-de Sitter spacetime, with spherical, toric and hyperbolic horizons, corresponding to the topological parameter $k=1,0,-1$ respectively. We find a lower bound inequality $\frac{1}{T} \frac{\partial \dot I_{\rm WDW}}{\partial S}|_{Q,P_{\rm th}}> C$ for $k=0,1$, where $C$ is some order-one numerical constant. The lowest number in our examples is $C=(D-3)/(D-2)$. We also find that the quantity $(\dot I_{\rm WDW}-2P_{\rm th}\, ΔV_{\rm th})$ is greater than, equal to, or less than zero, for $k=1,0,-1$ respectively. For black holes with two horizons, $ΔV_{\rm th}=V_{\rm th}^+-V_{\rm th}^-$, i.e. the difference between the thermodynamical volumes of the outer and inner horizons. For black holes with only one horizon, we introduce a new concept of the volume $V_{\rm th}^0$ of the black hole singularity, and define $ΔV_{\rm th}=V_{\rm th}^+-V_{\rm th}^0$. The volume $V_{\rm th}^0$ vanishes for the Schwarzschild black hole, but in general it can be positive, negative or even divergent. For black holes with single horizon, we find a relation between $\dot I_{\rm WDW}$ and $V_{\rm th}^0$, which implies that the holographic complexity preserves the Lloyd's bound for positive or vanishing $V_{\rm th}^0$, but the bound is violated when $V_{\rm th}^0$ becomes negative. We also find explicit black hole examples where $V_{\rm th}^0$ and hence $\dot I_{\rm WDW}$ are divergent.

preprint2016arXiv

Estimating the EMG response exclusively to fatigue during sustained static maximum voluntary contraction

The increase of surface electromyography (sEMG) root-mean-square (RMS) is very frequently used to determine fatigue. However, as RMS is also influenced by muscle force,its effective usage as indicator of fatigue is mainly limited to isometric, constant force tasks.This research develops a simple me-thodto preclude the effect of muscle force, hereby estimates the EMG amplitude response exclusively to fatigue with RMS. Experiment was carried out on the biceps brachiis of 15 subjects (7males, 8 females) during sustained static maximum voluntary contractions (sMVC).Result shows that the sEMG RMS response to fatigue increasesto 21.27% while muscle force decreasing to 50%MVC, which implies that more and more extra effort is needed as muscle fatigue intensifies. It would be promising to use the RMS response exclusively to fatigue as an indicator of muscle fatigue.

preprint2015arXiv

Network Capability in Localizing Node Failures via End-to-end Path Measurements

We investigate the capability of localizing node failures in communication networks from binary states (normal/failed) of end-to-end paths. Given a set of nodes of interest, uniquely localizing failures within this set requires that different observable path states associate with different node failure events. However, this condition is difficult to test on large networks due to the need to enumerate all possible node failures. Our first contribution is a set of sufficient/necessary conditions for identifying a bounded number of failures within an arbitrary node set that can be tested in polynomial time. In addition to network topology and locations of monitors, our conditions also incorporate constraints imposed by the probing mechanism used. We consider three probing mechanisms that differ according to whether measurement paths are (i) arbitrarily controllable, (ii) controllable but cycle-free, or (iii) uncontrollable (determined by the default routing protocol). Our second contribution is to quantify the capability of failure localization through (1) the maximum number of failures (anywhere in the network) such that failures within a given node set can be uniquely localized, and (2) the largest node set within which failures can be uniquely localized under a given bound on the total number of failures. Both measures in (1-2) can be converted into functions of a per-node property, which can be computed efficiently based on the above sufficient/necessary conditions. We demonstrate how measures (1-2) proposed for quantifying failure localization capability can be used to evaluate the impact of various parameters, including topology, number of monitors, and probing mechanisms.

preprint2014arXiv

Determination of subject-specific muscle fatigue rates under static fatiguing operations

Cumulative local muscle fatigue may lead to potential musculoskeletal disorder (MSD) risks {\color{red}, and subject-specific muscle fatigability needs to be considered to reduce potential MSD risks.} This study was conducted to determine local muscle fatigue rate at shoulder joint level based on an exponential function derived from a muscle fatigue model. Forty male subjects participated in a fatiguing operation under a static posture with a range of relative force levels (14% - 33%). Remaining maximum muscle strengths were measured after different fatiguing sessions. The time course of strength decline was fitted to the exponential function. Subject-specific fatigue rates of shoulder joint moment strength were determined. Good correspondence ($R^2>0.8$) was found in the regression of the majority (35 out of 40 subjects). Substantial inter-individual variability in fatigue rate was found and discussed.

preprint2012arXiv

Human Arm simulation for interactive constrained environment design

During the conceptual and prototype design stage of an industrial product, it is crucial to take assembly/disassembly and maintenance operations in advance. A well-designed system should enable relatively easy access of operating manipulators in the constrained environment and reduce musculoskeletal disorder risks for those manual handling operations. Trajectory planning comes up as an important issue for those assembly and maintenance operations under a constrained environment, since it determines the accessibility and the other ergonomics issues, such as muscle effort and its related fatigue. In this paper, a customer-oriented interactive approach is proposed to partially solve ergonomic related issues encountered during the design stage under a constrained system for the operator's convenience. Based on a single objective optimization method, trajectory planning for different operators could be generated automatically. Meanwhile, a motion capture based method assists the operator to guide the trajectory planning interactively when either a local minimum is encountered within the single objective optimization or the operator prefers guiding the virtual human manually. Besides that, a physical engine is integrated into this approach to provide physically realistic simulation in real time manner, so that collision free path and related dynamic information could be computed to determine further muscle fatigue and accessibility of a product design

preprint2012arXiv

Human Muscle Fatigue Model in Dynamic Motions

Human muscle fatigue is considered to be one of the main reasons for Musculoskeletal Disorder (MSD). Recent models have been introduced to define muscle fatigue for static postures. However, the main drawbacks of these models are that the dynamic effect of the human and the external load are not taken into account. In this paper, each human joint is assumed to be controlled by two muscle groups to generate motions such as push/pull. The joint torques are computed using Lagrange's formulation to evaluate the dynamic factors of the muscle fatigue model. An experiment is defined to validate this assumption and the result for one person confirms its feasibility. The evaluation of this model can predict the fatigue and MSD risk in industry production quickly.

preprint2011arXiv

A framework of motion capture system based human behaviours simulation for ergonomic analysis

With the increasing of computer capabilities, Computer aided ergonomics (CAE) offers new possibilities to integrate conventional ergonomic knowledge and to develop new methods into the work design process. As mentioned in [1], different approaches have been developed to enhance the efficiency of the ergonomic evaluation. Ergonomic expert systems, ergonomic oriented information systems, numerical models of human, etc. have been implemented in numerical ergonomic software. Until now, there are ergonomic software tools available, such as Jack, Ergoman, Delmia Human, 3DSSPP, and Santos, etc. [2-4]. The main functions of these tools are posture analysis and posture prediction. In the visualization part, Jack and 3DSSPP produce results to visualize virtual human tasks in 3-dimensional, but without realistic physical properties. Nowadays, with the development of computer technology, the simulation of physical world is paid more attention. Physical engines [5] are used more and more in computer game (CG) field. The advantage of physical engine is the nature physical world environment simulation. The purpose of our research is to use the CG technology to create a virtual environment with physical properties for ergonomic analysis of virtual human.

preprint2011arXiv

A novel approach for determining fatigue resistances of different muscle groups in static cases

In ergonomics and biomechanics, muscle fatigue models based on maximum endurance time (MET) models are often used to integrate fatigue effect into ergonomic and biomechanical application. However, due to the empirical principle of those MET models, the disadvantages of this method are: 1) the MET models cannot reveal the muscle physiology background very well; 2) there is no general formation for those MET models to predict MET. In this paper, a theoretical MET model is extended from a simple muscle fatigue model with consideration of the external load and maximum voluntary contraction in passive static exertion cases. The universal availability of the extended MET model is analyzed in comparison to 24 existing empirical MET models. Using mathematical regression method, 21 of the 24 MET models have intraclass correlations over 0.9, which means the extended MET model could replace the existing MET models in a general and computationally efficient way. In addition, an important parameter, fatigability (or fatigue resistance) of different muscle groups, could be calculated via the mathematical regression approach. Its mean value and its standard deviation are useful for predicting MET values of a given population during static operations. The possible reasons influencing the fatigue resistance were classified and discussed, and it is still a very challenging work to find out the quantitative relationship between the fatigue resistance and the influencing factors.

preprint2011arXiv

Can virtual reality predict body part discomfort and performance of people in realistic world for assembling tasks?

This paper presents our work on relationship of evaluation results between virtual environment (VE) and realistic environment (RE) for assembling tasks. Evaluation results consist of subjective results (BPD and RPE) and objective results (posture and physical performance). Same tasks were performed with same experimental configurations and evaluation results were measured in RE and VE respectively. Then these evaluation results were compared. Slight difference of posture between VE and RE was found but not great difference of effect on people according to conventional ergonomics posture assessment method. Correlation of BPD and performance results between VE and RE are found by linear regression method. Moreover, results of BPD, physical performance, and RPE in VE are higher than that in RE with significant difference. Furthermore, these results indicates that subjects feel more discomfort and fatigue in VE than RE because of additional effort required in VE.

preprint2010arXiv

A Framework for Interactive Work Design based on Digital Work Analysis and Simulation

Due to the flexibility and adaptability of human, manual handling work is still very important in industry, especially for assembly and maintenance work. Well-designed work operation can improve work efficiency and quality; enhance safety, and lower cost. Most traditional methods for work system analysis need physical mock-up and are time consuming. Digital mockup (DMU) and digital human modeling (DHM) techniques have been developed to assist ergonomic design and evaluation for a specific worker population (e.g. 95 percentile); however, the operation adaptability and adjustability for a specific individual are not considered enough. In this study, a new framework based on motion tracking technique and digital human simulation technique is proposed for motion-time analysis of manual operations. A motion tracking system is used to track a worker's operation while he/she is conducting a manual handling work. The motion data is transferred to a simulation computer for real time digital human simulation. The data is also used for motion type recognition and analysis either online or offline for objective work efficiency evaluation and subjective work task evaluation. Methods for automatic motion recognition and analysis are presented. Constraints and limitations of the proposed method are discussed.

preprint2010arXiv

A new muscle fatigue and recovery model and its ergonomics application in human simulation

Although automatic techniques have been employed in manufacturing industries to increase productivity and efficiency, there are still lots of manual handling jobs, especially for assembly and maintenance jobs. In these jobs, musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) are one of the major health problems due to overload and cumulative physical fatigue. With combination of conventional posture analysis techniques, digital human modelling and simulation (DHM) techniques have been developed and commercialized to evaluate the potential physical exposures. However, those ergonomics analysis tools are mainly based on posture analysis techniques, and until now there is still no fatigue index available in the commercial software to evaluate the physical fatigue easily and quickly. In this paper, a new muscle fatigue and recovery model is proposed and extended to evaluate joint fatigue level in manual handling jobs. A special application case is described and analyzed by digital human simulation technique.

preprint2010arXiv

Fatigue evaluation in maintenance and assembly operations by digital human simulation

Virtual human techniques have been used a lot in industrial design in order to consider human factors and ergonomics as early as possible. The physical status (the physical capacity of virtual human) has been mostly treated as invariable in the current available human simulation tools, while indeed the physical capacity varies along time in an operation and the change of the physical capacity depends on the history of the work as well. Virtual Human Status is proposed in this paper in order to assess the difficulty of manual handling operations, especially from the physical perspective. The decrease of the physical capacity before and after an operation is used as an index to indicate the work difficulty. The reduction of physical strength is simulated in a theoretical approach on the basis of a fatigue model in which fatigue resistances of different muscle groups were regressed from 24 existing maximum endurance time (MET) models. A framework based on digital human modeling technique is established to realize the comparison of physical status. An assembly case in airplane assembly is simulated and analyzed under the framework. The endurance time and the decrease of the joint moment strengths are simulated. The experimental result in simulated operations under laboratory conditions confirms the feasibility of the theoretical approach.

preprint2010arXiv

Integrating digital human modeling into virtual environment for ergonomic oriented design

Virtual human simulation integrated into virtual reality applications is mainly used for virtual representation of the user in virtual environment or for interactions between the user and the virtual avatar for cognitive tasks. In this paper, in order to prevent musculoskeletal disorders, the integration of virtual human simulation and VR application is presented to facilitate physical ergonomic evaluation, especially for physical fatigue evaluation of a given population. Immersive working environments are created to avoid expensive physical mock-up in conventional evaluation methods. Peripheral motion capture systems are used to capture natural movements and then to simulate the physical operations in virtual human simulation. Physical aspects of human's movement are then analyzed to determine the effort level of each key joint using inverse kinematics. The physical fatigue level of each joint is further analyzed by integrating a fatigue and recovery model on the basis of physical task parameters. All the process has been realized based on VRHIT platform and a case study is presented to demonstrate the function of the physical fatigue for a given population and its usefulness for worker selection.

preprint2010arXiv

Using virtual human for an interactive customer-oriented constrained environment design

For industrial product design, it is very important to take into account assembly/disassembly and maintenance operations during the conceptual and prototype design stage. For these operations or other similar operations in a constrained environment, trajectory planning is always a critical and difficult issue for evaluating the design or for the users' convenience. In this paper, a customer-oriented approach is proposed to partially solve ergonomic issues encountered during the design stage of a constrained environment. A single objective optimization based method is taken from the literature to generate the trajectory in a constrained environment automatically. A motion capture based method assists to guide the trajectory planning interactively if a local minimum is encountered within the single objective optimization. At last, a multi-objective evaluation method is proposed to evaluate the operations generated by the algorithm