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Japan Displays Prototype Robot Suit
anaesthetica writes "A project at Tsukuba University has produced a battery-powered robot suit designed to aid the wearer in strength-related tasks, like lifting heavy objects. The suit also has the capability of propelling itself, which is potentially useful for helping the handicapped or elderly walk. The optimistic professor who lead the project stated, 'Humans may be able to mutate into supermen in the near future.'"
That sounded to me pretty much just like the kind of hardsuits that the Knight Sabers wore in Bubblegum Crisis. You'll know what I'm talking about if you've watched the anime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_Crisis
But this isn't going to be intuitive enough for many tasks I think. What we need is something similar to the "power suit" in Aliens, but without having it so directly attached to the wearer of the suit. In other words, my muscular motions should be interpreted within microseconds and the suit responds accordingly. To me it would only feel natural if walking around in a 2-ton suit of metal parts felt exactly the same as walking around in 2-pounds worth of clothing.
I've already barely survived decades of them ambling down streets and highways inside of their 3 to 4 ton Cadillacs, how is this worse? And even more fearsome are impatient young male Chicago bus drivers in 15 ton WMD.
I see that there are no gloves for this suit. So... in theory, you have arms that can lift 800lbs, with hands and fingers that will tear off your body at ~500lbs (assuming it's fragile little thing like that guy).
Remind me again why you would want to be able to have superhuman strength when all it's going to do is cause you to smash a body part if not amputate yourself by accident.
> I suppose if you expanded the group of
> "handicapped" to include those suffering from
> polio and other diseases that result muscular
> dystrophy...
It's strange definition of 'handicapped' that excludes those people.
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It's hardly the handicapped person walking, then. Perhaps carried is a better word. Even motiled maybe a better word.
Walking, it ain't.
Semantics. Clearly they wouldn't be walking in the classic sense of the word, but they'd be repeating the same action, bipedal movement. They just wouldn't be triggering the movement with their own legs, but via another source. I assure you that everyone doing it will refer to it as 'walking' as opposed to "being carried" or "motiled". People want to focus on what they can do, not what they can't, so they'll want to use the most positive term, which in this case would be, walking.
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Yeah... just like remote controls were able to mutate us into being able to control electronic equipment with our minds.
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"How? The only things I can think of that help against such guerilla tactics are good armor and staying alert. Anyhow, who needs super strength when you have good ol' firepower?"
Which is exactly why and what for: to enable soldiers to carry more armour and dish out more firepower.
Don't think for a moment that military applications of super-strength will mean Superman-style punching villains in the face. It won't. Ever.
However a major topic throughough the last century has been the weight of ammo and equipment a soldier has to carry. It's a real issue. That's one of the reasons (among other factors) why we've moved to smaller calibres.
Put some powered armour on those soldiers and suddenly they can carry a lot more heavy weaponry and ammo.
Individual armour has also been discarded precisely because of weight considerations: you _could_ make a breastplate that could stop a rifle round, but it was impractically heavy.
Now think the other way around: if you have an armoured exo-skeleton, you can carry enough armour at least over the vital organs to stop even a 7.62mm round or shrapnel from hand grenades and pipe bombs. _And_ this time it's without a mobility penalty.
You've just made life harder for the enemy soldiers, because now they need to lug around bigger weaponry to take you out, which limits _their_ mobility.
But perhaps more importantly, and this is really what makes it a wet dream for the military is: enabling soldiers to carry more electronics and a sattellite connection. Giving at least one soldier per squad enough electronics to know exactly where the enemy is, what's happening, where is the squad needed, what should they avoid, etc, is something that can give a _huge_ advantage.
Nations have been defeated before because basically their chain of command didn't react fast enough. E.g., that's why large armies like those of France or Poland crumbled in the face of Blitzkrieg in WW2. They just weren't prepared to react at that speed.
Or the USSR in WW2 was massively handicapped by their lack of radios on their tanks.
Now picture giving each squad a direct link to their officers _all_ the time. Bidirectional. You can know _exactly_ what's happening at each point, in real time, and the soldiers can know exactly what's expected of them. You can instantly see when your troops are being pinned and flanked, and how, and you can tell them exactly how to counter it. Better yet they too can see a bigger picture and react in a more intelligent manner.
It's something that can really make or break a battle.
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You could have the exoskeleton partially resist every muscle movement. Then it becomes an exercise suit.
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