Next-Gen Robot Suit Lightens the Load

[unhappycamper]

Next-Gen Robot Suit Lightens the Load
Popular Mechanics | Alex Hutchinson | November 28, 2007

It seems like a fair trade: All you have to do is walk a little funny, and your backpack will feel 80 percent lighter, thanks to some fancy spring work developed at MIT. The new exoskeleton, developed by 2005 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership Award winner Hugh Herr and his Biomechatronics group, aims to transfer heavy loads directly to the ground through a series of springs and tubes running along the legs and torso of its wearer.

"Robot suits" that endow humans with superhuman strength have been in development for decades, by everyone from home tinkerers to military-funded researchers. Roboticists at Japan's University of Tsukuba have been refining their Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL), showing off its ability to effortlessly hoist 100 pounds of rice bags. And engineers in California unveiled the Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (BLEEX) back in 2004, demonstrating the ability to carry a 70-pound backpack that only felt like five pounds to the human strapping it on. The catch: BLEEX itself weighed 100 pounds, thanks to the 3000-watt internal combustion engine used to power its network of sensors and actuators.

The MIT exoskeleton, in contrast, uses just two watts of power, relying instead on a network of springs and dampers to passively transfer the load to the ground. The system attaches to its wearer through shoulder straps, a waist belt, thigh cuffs and a shoe connection -- which means it's still not quite like slinging on your everyday backpack from high school. "You can definitely tell it's affecting your gait," admits Conor Walsh, a grad student who worked on the project.

Tests showed that subjects used about 10 percent more oxygen than normal when wearing the device, thanks to the effort of adjusting to the awkward gait. But they also showed that the load of an 80-pound backpack was reduced by 80 percent. For DARPA, which funded the research, that's an important step toward lightening the load of soldiers in the field. The researchers plan to tweak the design, with the goal of making the walking motion more natural.


Article at: http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,157149,00.html?wh=wh

[PetrusMonsFormicarum]

1. Could be serious trouble

for disabled vets. Once the legs are perfected, I can easily see the jaded, heartless Pentagon telling IED casualties that their goldbricking days are over.

Of course, if they perfect the legs, they might as well just finish off an entire skeletal body. The next step would be to remove the organic elements from the machine. If we could reduce war to a bunch of robots heading out to a battlefield to beat the tar out of each other, maybe we'd be getting somewhere.