Back

A longer stance is more stable for a standing horse

Gellman, K.; Ruina, A.

2021-10-19 biophysics
10.1101/2021.10.15.464610 bioRxiv
Show abstract

What is the effect of posture on the stability of a standing horse? We address this with a 2D quasistatic model. The model horse has 3 rigid parts: a trunk, a massless fore-limb and a massless rear limb, and has hinges at the shoulder, hip, and hooves. The postural parameter{ell} g is the distance between the hooves. For a given{ell} g, statics finds an equilibrium configuration which, with no muscle stabilization, is unstable. To measure the neuro-muscular effort to maintain stability, we add springs at the shoulder and hip; the larger the springs needed to stabilize the model, the more the neuro-muscular effort needed for stabilization. We find that a canted-in posture (small{ell} g), observed in some pathological domestic horses, requires about twice the spring stiffness (representing twice the neuromuscular effort) as is needed for postures with vertical or slightly splayed-out (large{ell} g) legs.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.