Better Power Armor

You might enjoy knowing that the suit featured in the video (link in post above) is being developed by a company named, none other than; 'Cyberdyne'. ;-)

http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/robotsuithal/index.html

I've been following these people's research for a few years now and am very happy with their progress. They are likely to make some extremely beneficial progress of use especially to the medical community. However the control mechanism they are using is in fact 'not' very responsive in that it is not particularly accurate. While seven decades of additional research would certainly help., right now someone wearing this suit would find it quite impossible to play a gentle game of badminton. It's like an agility penalty of minus ten right now.
 
Panpiper said:
You might enjoy knowing that the suit featured in the video (link in post above) is being developed by a company named, none other than; 'Cyberdyne'. ;-)

http://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/robotsuithal/index.html

I've been following these people's research for a few years now and am very happy with their progress. They are likely to make some extremely beneficial progress of use especially to the medical community. However the control mechanism they are using is in fact 'not' very responsive in that it is not particularly accurate. While seven decades of additional research would certainly help., right now someone wearing this suit would find it quite impossible to play a gentle game of badminton. It's like an agility penalty of minus ten right now.
Click to expand...

i think the routes they are going are stupid.... the basic design of the exoskeleton itself looks shiity. something like that should try to stick to the human frame as much as possible to maximize strength and limit size. look at the thing in videos, the arms of it stick way out and dont even come close to running along the user's. sure you probably could use it for manual labor but using it as a basis for power armor? nope not gonna happen.

the other issue is that they are doing amplification of movement rather then the route of trying to read nerve impulses, which in other experiments is making great leaps(there was even a man who managed to operate nasa's new robotic human hand with a transmitter chip in his wrist).

added: sorry just looked at the page. i thought you were referring to the piece of crap that the us army has been interested in. that thing in the link above is a LOT better....
 
Well, strictly speaking these cyberdyne folks were not really thinking about power armor when they took DARPA money. That may have something to do with why DARPA stopped funding them. That said the BLEEX exoskeleton by Sarcos 'was' accepted by DARPA for field testing as a munitions loader. The BLEEX exoskeleton is even less form fitting than the HAL, though in my opinion, the BLEEX control system is far more reliable though still conferring a massive agility penalty.

Ultimately I believe any deployed power armor will be using a muscle analogue mechanism rather than electric servos (HAL) or hydraulics (BLEEX). Electric servos and hydraulics both inevitably require bulky and fragile systems, which are obviously inappropriate for actual power armor. Very interesting progress is being made on the use of carbon nanotube sheets (among other things) as a muscle system.

It should be possible within the next ten to twenty years to replace hydraulics and servos with direct action muscles. A deployed power armor very likely will be precisely custom fitted to the wearer with the interior layer being the equivalent of an extremely form fitting bullet resistant plastic suit of plate armor. This interior layer would form the load bearing structure of the power armor as using an exterior shell for load bearing would expose the body of the wearer to all sorts of distortion stresses that would at the least be painful, if not injurious. Muscle analogues would be place on the exterior of this interior shell in virtually the same layout as a the muscle structure of a human being, this so the suit could respond with as natural a movement as possible to the actions of the wearer.

The exterior of the suit would be a flexible bullet resistant skin, not a hard shell (though there likely would be hard shell sections). The soft skin exterior is necessary so as to permit extremes of body position. Just like your own soft tissue deforms to allow one to flex one's limbs, so too will it be necessary for power armor to deform to allow the wearer to move flexibly.

And they'll probably burn gasoline/diesel/kerosene with a fuel cell.
 
I've seen a much more military looking one granted it's basically a frame one and not storm troopery like the Japanese one and i think this one is at Cal tech.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top