Abstract
The pole vaulting is a sport involving complex dynamic motion. The aim of pole vaulting for the vaulter is to achieve maximum height. To do so, it is necessary to understand the complex relationship between skills and pole properties, and to master it. The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of factors on the pole vaulting performance such as the joints torque of the vaulter, pole stiffness and length etc. However, it becomes the optimization calculation with many design variables, it takes a large computational cost. Therefore, we need a pole vault simulator with small computational cost advantageous to optimization calculation. In this paper, we proposed a three-dimensional rigid body link model of pole and vaulter system by using Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics. The proposed model's pole characteristics and vaulter's joints torque were optimized by using Genetic Algorithm (GA) so as to achieve maximum height. The result of this research can be utilized in sport engineering to understand optimum skills and to design optimum poles.
