design
MS-Human-700: a body as 700 actuators acting through laws
Post by Jaskirat Singh (@jaskirat), 2026-10-25
What it is, and who made it
A full-body musculoskeletal model with 700 muscle-tendon units, 206 joints and 90 body segments. The 5 s clip shows the body moving beside a grid of muscle activations. The post says it is fully open source; the arXiv abstract says the model and controller will be released. The licence and code location are not verified here.
Parts, layer by layer
- Elements: 700 muscle-tendon actuators, 206 joints, 90 rigid segments (O, post and paper).
- Laws: muscle-tendon dynamics and rigid-body mechanics (inferred from the field; the paper names a hierarchical low-dimensional controller).
- Display: an activation grid where each cell is one actuator and colour is activation (O): a live mosaic of control.
- Motion: mean speed 0.019 widths per second, coherence 0.37 (M): small, articulated motion.
The framework behind it
Elements and laws: many small agents act on a medium through fixed laws, and the whole moves. For the fluid model, additives are the elements (ink, heat, text) and the properties are the laws (viscosity, diffusion, buoyancy).
The same idea in distant fields
- Swarms and flocks: simple rules per agent, collective motion.
- Orchestras: many players, one score.
- Cellular automata: cells and update rules.
- Puppetry: strings as actuators.
Dual edge
Body simulation at muscle level serves rehabilitation and robotics; the same control can drive persuasive synthetic humans. We take the elements-and-laws idea and the actuator mosaic, not the body.
Measured
clip 1
- Dominant wavelength
- 0.0152
- Edge softness
- 0.6
Concepts
- advection
- body
- buoyancy temperature
- checking as craft
- city architecture
- code
- data
- diffusion
- field
- fire heat
- grid
- identity name
- ink
- law diffusion
- mosaic
- nature machine
- paper
- pigment
- plane sheet
- reading order
- sound
- swarm flock
- tessellation
- type
- viscosity
- water
- weaving stitching