CYberdyne INC (Japan) has a very advanced Hybrid Assistive Limb project as well. It's not developed for military purposes but for helping the disabled and elderly in their daily tasks. They will begin production in 2012.
I can imagine this thing being pretty impressive on a construction site - it could presumably do quite a few things which require a mini excavator today, like using extra-heavy jackhammers or clearing huge pieces of rubble. Having watched a warehouse near my flat being ponderously disassembled by a trio of excavators, I wonder whether using an exoskeleton would allow for greater speed due to a much more direct mapping of tool movement to natural human movements.
Definitely. Not just for demo, either— something trivial like sheetrocking a ceiling can be a hassle for a team of guys, never mind about something harder like framing. A team of guys in robosuits could knock it right out.
It would be a shame if these would be only used for combat and war. Imagine how cool it would be for hard jobs like builders or miners. But I guess in war and combat is way more money than in those hard jobs.
It'll take five years to start deploying a version of the suit that must be tethered to a power source ... And for a free-range version, expect to wait a decade or more
5 years, 10 years... It's okay for me: whenever I see old people hobbling along as a I race past them to catch my train, I pray that exoskeletons hit the mass market before my legs stop working.
Ha, that immediately started me thinking - what if you remove the human, and fill the space with 70kg of battery, and then hook the think up to a mirror suit back at base worn by a real human receiving force feedback - instant Robocop.
> By now, with films like Iron Man, its sequel, and Avatar, Hollywood has made us thoroughly familiar with the idea of the robotic exoskeleton.
I'm sorry, what? If you don't know what you're talking about, just don't talk about it. It's that simple. You lose credibility all around for every mistake you make.
Hollywood is not what made exoskeletons familiar. Things like the Iron Man comic series accomplished that long before Hollywood thought about it. It has also appeared in countless games, such as the Halo series.
But if you want to give extra credit to Hollywood, you should look at earlier popular movies that used exoskeletons. Such as the defenders of Zion in the sequels to The Matrix, or Starship Troopers.
Imagine how many keyboards you'd mash if you used this while hacking in your old age haha. There are so many great applications for this, I just hope humanity, like Tony Stark uses this for good.
The exoskeleton is supposed to follow your movements, so you'll shift your center of gravity in the same way you normally pick up a 50 or 100 lb weight without the exo. If the added mass of the exoskeleton isn't enough to let you compensate through such repositioning, then you won't lift the 500 lbs.
This thing is designed to augment strength and reduce fatigue, not grant omnipotent lifting.
(Smaller people like me tend to better understand the effect of advantageous positioning to reduce fatigue and better leverage what you can move and lift. Yes, one can actually use one's brain to do more physical labor.)
Take a look at the "Large Dextrous Arm" video. The operator has an arm in a haptic-feedback harness, which means he is virtually feeling what it's like to have a giant-sized arm that can pick up an anvil like a coffee cup.
Sarcos corporation actually knows how to build a full-body haptic feedback harness. Build one of those into the center of gravity of a 50 foot tall hydraulically actuated mechanical body, and add mechanisms ensuring that the orientation of the harness homunculus is always the same as the orientation of the giant mech homunculus. Since the orientation of both the giant and harness forms are the same, the human pilot's inner ear can become the gyroscopic mechanism for the whole mechanism.
In other words, you'd have a Japanese style "Giant Robot" with scaled-up human-like coordination and agility. (There would be an expansion in time for movements, but a human pilot should be able to compensate.)
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[ 15.8 ms ] story [ 595 ms ] threadhttp://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/robotsuithal/index.html
Are they building a digital defense network called Skynet?
I would be surprised if they did not have some system named "Skynet".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdPpWy_O09k
It'll take five years to start deploying a version of the suit that must be tethered to a power source ... And for a free-range version, expect to wait a decade or more
Ooh, burn.
Looks closer to the Alien loader exoskeletons - still very cool.
I think what you're describing is more along the lines of a drone, as used in the aerial sense (UAV:s).
I'm sorry, what? If you don't know what you're talking about, just don't talk about it. It's that simple. You lose credibility all around for every mistake you make.
But if you want to give extra credit to Hollywood, you should look at earlier popular movies that used exoskeletons. Such as the defenders of Zion in the sequels to The Matrix, or Starship Troopers.
Not really Iron Man's suit - it's more like Ripley's mechanical suit from Alien, used primarily to move heavy crates in a loading bay.
Get your references right, HN
http://www.figures.com/forums/attachments/news/9508d12810229...
In a real-life combat situation, that would be debilitating, but it would be workable in a construction, rescue, or sporting context.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLnOPA7oMxY
It seems like this would be a major factor when center of gravity shifts as it does not compensate for it.
This thing is designed to augment strength and reduce fatigue, not grant omnipotent lifting.
(Smaller people like me tend to better understand the effect of advantageous positioning to reduce fatigue and better leverage what you can move and lift. Yes, one can actually use one's brain to do more physical labor.)
http://www.sarcos.com/teleop_videos.html
Take a look at the "Large Dextrous Arm" video. The operator has an arm in a haptic-feedback harness, which means he is virtually feeling what it's like to have a giant-sized arm that can pick up an anvil like a coffee cup.
Sarcos corporation actually knows how to build a full-body haptic feedback harness. Build one of those into the center of gravity of a 50 foot tall hydraulically actuated mechanical body, and add mechanisms ensuring that the orientation of the harness homunculus is always the same as the orientation of the giant mech homunculus. Since the orientation of both the giant and harness forms are the same, the human pilot's inner ear can become the gyroscopic mechanism for the whole mechanism.
In other words, you'd have a Japanese style "Giant Robot" with scaled-up human-like coordination and agility. (There would be an expansion in time for movements, but a human pilot should be able to compensate.)