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Iron Man Is Another Step Closer To a Reality
arshadk writes with this excerpt from an article at CNN:
"Inside a prosthetic shell of metal and hydraulics, Raytheon test engineer Rex Jameson is putting an XOS-2 exoskeleton through its paces. As the crowd watches, Jameson uses his robot hydraulic arm to shadowbox, break three inches of pine boards and toss around 72-pound ammunition cases like a bored contestant on the 'World's Strongest Man.' The suit moves as he moves and amplifies his strength 17-fold. ... Raytheon is seeking to develop the suits to help the US military carry supplies, and claims that one operator in an exoskeleton suit can do the work of two to three soldiers. If all goes as planned, the company hopes to see 'Iron Man' suits deployed in the field by 2015."
Simple math:
Ironman - man = Terminator
I dont think tinfoil is going to protect my skull against this thing.
next time I need to punch wood... I get this guy?
This needs more cowbell!!!
"Raytheon is seeking to develop the suits to help the US military carry supplies"
Cue: Power Armour in 3...2...1.
Come on, you apes! You wanna live forever?
This story refers to the Second Generation of the Raytheon Exoskeleton released at the time of the Iron Man 2 DVD back in September.
We've seen footage of the guy tossing ammo boxes and shadow boxing, but those were all the first generation suit, unless you saw this story already on Engadget, Scientific American, etc.
I think they're going to need a suitable power source before this is useful in the field. When are nanotubes going to bring that huge battery increase I keep hearing about?!
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Either that or the mobile power unit we see in the actual Ironman movies...Good point.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
"Inside a prosthetic shell of metal and hydraulics, Raytheon test engineer Rex Jameson is putting an XOS-2 exoskeleton through its paces."
How many of his kids is J. Jonah going to send after Spidey?
The only thing I thought the whole time I watched this is US defense spending is way to over bloated to have this kind of useless spending.
Every time you fold something, it doubles.
So 17-fold means the suits amplifies his strength by 2^17=131072.
ALL BOW BEFORE HIM
Until there's a meaningful way to store the energy in a format light enough to be carried by the suit / bearer, it's nothing more than a technology demo --- a cool one, but not useful in the field yet.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
See the "Related Topics" on the left side of the article? "DC Comics Inc.". Way to fail, CNN. Iron Man is a Marvel Comics franchise.
Double Compile
I appreciate the time tested parlor trick of breaking wood, however I can guarantee you that you cannot build a house with the strength of that lumber and expect it to stand up. The official engineering capacity of that wood, in that failure mode, is zero. It's called cross grain bending, and it is forbidden to count structural support in that orientation.
I will be impressed when the suit can break through the center of a single piece of southern pine, 3" thick, held between to pinned (or fixed, for that mater) supports. Then again, you'd need something with orders of magnitude more power.
Finally ... Rift's world is almost here, just need the Boom Gun, some Bedazzling, and to invade South America.
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
Stuff like this seems more like the power armor from Starship Troopers than Iron-Man. Negative feedback, increased strength, assisted running, etc. It's all there. Just strap a Y-rack on the back and some other weapons, and there you go. Now, if only we can find a way to add the jump jets, that would be awesome. I guess it's just a lot more pop-culturey to call them Iron Man suits, unfortunately.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Gee, really? I knew some kids in my high-school karate classes who could do similar things with nothing more than a little technique and focus. I have personally photographed some older, tougher guys punching through 4 - 6 inches of concrete (though of course these are thinner slabs held separate from each other.) Maybe punching through those boards the way he does in the video requires a 17-fold increase in strength, but you could just teach a guy proper board-breaking alignment and get the same result. Make him punch a hole in a telephone pole or a sidewalk or something.
We've seen lots of competitors to Stark Industries try to make cheap knockoff imitators. But unless they have mastered the arc reactor technology, I don't think this will be competitive to their offering. If they insist on using the word Iron Man in their promotional material they should expect to hear from Stark Industries' attorneys.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Get back to me when you can actually run an Iron Man Triathalon in one of these. Until then, please refer to it as a powered exoskeleton, not an "Iron Man suit"!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Like the phrase "iPod killer", why do I get the feeling that referring to this technology as "the real Iron Man!!" is going to get over repeated my the media in the next few years.
I know I'm already sick of them calling it that. ....still cool though.
Wait until he puts his robot hydraulic foot on an IED.
Buy one suit, military keeps it repaired for 20 years, 20 years of 2 people in the military > 1 suit.
Of course. Because the average soldier will wear this suit every day for 20 years.
Are you high?
Ironman - man = iron. Meaning that even without an operator, this device should still be able to get the wrinkles out of my clothes!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You can hire 50 guys over a long period for $150,000? I think the feds might want a word, not to mention the unions...
So the Sabbath reunion is underway?
Kewl.
Are extremely easy to break, which is why we use them in tae kwon do. Little kids have to break them for testing. Adults would often punch or kick through 3 or 4 boards like this. Not impressed.
If its your job to carry stuff around every day, then yes, they will wear it everyday. I am sure the army has plenty of grunt positions within supply that required moving around lots of boxes.
> the company hopes to see 'Iron Man' suits deployed in the field by 2015.
Yes! THAT'S how you win 'the heart and minds' of the conquered:
Prisoner: "What did you do with my donkey?"
Army guy: "Oh...Iron Joe here threw it out of the way while we were storming your house. But don't worry...it should come down to earth any minute now..."
The only thing I thought the whole time I watched this is US defense spending is way to over bloated to have this kind of useless spending.
I agree up to a point. OTH, if this leads to an "Iron Man" type of suit, then I'm all for it. Wars are now going to be urban fights mixed in with civilians - aircraft, missiles, and even drones are too blunt of an instrument for handling these types of battles.
What I'm saying is more money should be spent on things like this instead of Cold War era type of weapons - i.e. F-22.
We have limited resources and we need to be smart about our spending.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Yeah, just like all the other equipment the military fields. I mean really, how do they expect those tanks to be of any value when they aren't crewed EVERY HOUR of EVERY DAY by the SAME PEOPLE?! Just like how you know when one person leaves the military, the vehicle he used is decommissioned with him.
Or at least that's how it apparently works in your tiny, tiny mind (this just in! When one person stops using a piece of equipment, ANOTHER PERSON *gasp!* can then use the same equipment! HOLY FUCKING SHIT!), and stop projecting your constant recreational drug use onto others.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
You have no clue how much it costs to employ and move actual people.
When you add up the costs of recruiting, training, and paying (both in $ and in things like medical care and other benefits) a soldier, if you can spend a few hundred thousand on something that removes a couple soldiers, you have saved money.
Moreover, you can put this in a box and leave it around at nearly zero cost between missions; your real live person has to be paid all the time.
Moreover, transporting one person and one box of mech-suit to the middle of nowhere is probably way cheaper than transporting three persons to the middle of nowhere, because you don't have to keep shipping in food and water to the mech suit (assuming you have a good local power source, which admittedly is quite an assumption).
had to beat a man to death with my K&R book and then warm my hands overt his body before it could cool.
Can we stop with the 'war' this and 'war' that?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The whole thing is rip off of a Japanese invention for disabled people.
depending on the job, then yeah, it's worht the cost.
A jet does the work for 10,000 mean at the cost of 150,000. well worth it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The video in the linked story is really poor. What's the one thing you want to see in a video about a guy in an exoskeleton? You want to see him doing stuff. The video has a couple of quick shots of him punching and doing push-ups, and that's it. Poor.
....if this suit is entirely mechanical, or if it requires the loading of some sort of firmware OS? Of course, ANY OS, firmware or software, is a potential security risk in ways that physical lockdowns won't easily accommodate. Imagine, on the battlefield where these are deployed, the enemy manages to release an exploit that causes CPU failure in these things, or something along those lines. You start out with a logistics team that can push materials 3 times faster than the enemy, the exploit is triggered, and you suddenly find a logistics team that can't even push open a barn door from the inside! Enemy wins. Not a pleasant thought.
The Japanese have been developing this for decades. They knew a demographic bomb was going to go off, and they knew that nurses were going to need some help in dealing with the elderly. So there are now production power suits geared towards assisting nurses in lifting patients.
Also there is a very strong possibility this technology can be applied to assistive systems for paraplegics and quadriplegics. Imagine someone who was "sentenced to the Chair" for the rest of their lives being able to walk again. I mean, neither application is particularly sexy, not like super-soldiers and being able to do the last battle in Aliens for real, but I would say that this would be a boon for humanity far greater than any military application.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I wonder if it's possible to punch yourself in the face by accident...
Do a version with a fuckton of armour and a faggy moustache, kick in the wrong door, and slaughter grandma in her bed with impunity: this thing is perfect for SWAT.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Firstly, it's too bad the military-industrial climate in the US means that the first "application" of such technology is towards "the soldier of the future". I see such a "strength-enhancing" technology as more useful in contexts like warehouse management, replacing forklifts, rather than soldiering, where I'd think that "small, quick and light" would be virtues. As mentioned in other comments, "helping old people" is how they think of this kind of thing in Japan. (Though it makes me laugh to think about a grandfather type wearing such a gigantic exoskeleton to do the groceries..)
Anyways, the real point of my post was to think about safety issues. Every time I see exoskeleton technology, it makes me think about the fact that acceleration-based positive feedback control has a tendency to "explode" if you're not very careful. I'd be afraid of putting such a suit on for fear of it ripping my arm off if something malfunctioned. What kind of safety restrictions are in place on this thing?
By positive feedback, I mean: In a typical control situation, you'd have sensors that can tell you, 'hey you're pulling really hard on the arm right now and there is a lot of resistance, so stop.' However in this case, I'd imagine the logic is more like 'hey you're pulling really hard on the arm right now, and there is a lot of resistance, meaning the guy needs more help, so pull harder!'
Ivan Vanko: Drone better.
Justin Hammer: Drone better? What, why drone better? Ivan, I got an order for suits, not drones!
Breaking 3" of pine boards is not all that impressive to me. I know a guy who can break 4 boards (no spacers) with a kick. I'm sure there are people who can do that without the exoskeleton. It's still pretty impressive to me from an engineering standpoint, and I'm not really questioning the claim that it increases the strength 17x, I just don't think it was a very good demo. For breaking stuff, speed is very important, and this thing didn't look like it made him faster. Maybe they should have had him crush something or lift something instead.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Oh yes. I look forward to when id10t errors rip off users' limbs. Or a bug in the most recent firmware upgrade.
So, it also works for farmers then?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Tony stark was able to build this in a cave..... with a box of scraps
You're assuming that the suit will be issued to a single soldier, and not reused by anybody else.
Mechanical suits don't need sleep, or time off - just occasional service and repair.
SCV ready to go!
You don't have to pay for the suit while it sleeps, or when it's 70 years old and is cashing in the free health care for life that you promised the suit 52 years ago.
Scenario 1: Wait for some people to shag. Wait 18 years for their sprog to grow. Spend tens or hundreds of thousands to train them. Send them off to the sandbox. They break their knee 3 months in. Oh well, it was worth a shot. Next!
Scenario 2: Spend hundreds of thousands, get suit in a few months or less. Send it to the sandbox. Reduce the support-to-combat staff ratio from 8:1 to 3:1. The knee breaks. The knee gets replaced and it goes back to work.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
Btw, anyone deriding the value of this technology clear doesn't love a handicapped person whose life could be changed by being able to function with minimal limits via this kind of technology. They also, I suspect, don't own a business that would benefit significantly by people being able to casually lift and move items weighing hundreds of pounds, without significant risk of injury.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
In Iron Man 2 they reveal some testing from an Iron Man competitor suit developed by another guy and the wearer gets basically crushed/broken because the suit moves too fast for him. I see that happening with these exo suits- tearing apart ligaments, etc.
Besides, the point is it doesn't need to be the average soldier, it can be any soldier. You don't need guys trained to lift huge weights when anyone, even relatively untrained support personnel, can wear this and throw ammo crates around, it might even be a way for soldiers injured in combat to still participate in the logistics side of things, and because it's a suit and doesn't rely on the skills/strength of the wearer, you can keep it running close to 24/7 if you need to.
Youtube vid on HULC
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
If it means that I don't have to join the army then fuck yeah, wear the shit for 20 years every day.
True.
And, when a soldier breaks, you get another soldier. When this thing breaks, you start filling out forms to request repair or replacement, and you get 1-2 more soldiers.
Frankly, if this thing was worth a damn, it would be all over the civilian logistics industry by now.
But it's not. So putting a soldier in it is just a distraction, and a way to get funding for something that's not as economical as some people think.
You're over 100 years old?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_control#History
And this is linked from that and is gob-smacking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletank
If you can blast an village away with an UAV
Is this based on the premise that military research is never taking place on the cutting edge of technology, and never generates anything that turns out to have useful civilian applications? Because I could swear that's what you're suggesting.
And if you are, please explain the Internet, the Hummer, and the host of emergency trauma treatment techniques, prosthetics, and other medical developments that have been developed as a result of defense spending?
No exoskeleton suit of armor is going to protect the occupant from the laws of physics.
Rapid deceleration will still injure/kill you.
In the Ironman movies, all that crashing about, and freefall from high altitudes then landing on his feet would've ripped his internal organs loose from their mountings and turned them into a puddle of goo at the bottom of his abdominal cavity. His brain would've plummented down thru the roof of his mouth as it shattered thru his palate bone and lodged in his pharynx. That's how my friend KJ died when he entered an unrecoverable spin in his stuntplane and pancaked it into a wheat field at about 75 mph downward velocity... I was there and saw his whole face looking flattened when his skull lost its internal structural integrity, and the crash didn't even look like he really had hit all that hard either, we expected him to have survived it, but with perhaps only back injuries :-(
In the Avatar movie, when Quaritch jumped out of the crashing assault ship in his AMP suit, that distance he plummeted, even with the fictional planet's lower gravity and the AMP's legs' shock absorbing ability, the sudden stop at the end would've fatally injured even a super tough badass like Quaritch was supposed to be.
The laws of physics are a bitch, and you cannot escape them.
The project gets canceled when Microsoft sues over Halo look and feel.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
If the military can turn this suit into an important tool for war, then there will be laws that ban civilians from having it, no matter how useful it could be for civilian industries. We could save space by having some work done by a man in a suit rather than a huge crane, and there are certainly many more important civilian uses for such a suit, but that probably won't happen.
You're missing the part where the military often cares more about maximum performance than maximum efficiency. It's like arguing that any advances made in formula one cars are worthless because if they were any good they'd be all over Camry's by now. The thing is that these techs do trickle down once they are no longer so cutting edge.
Microwave transmission of power can send 10s of kilowatts. A heavy infrantry squad travels in an armoured personnel carrier, so the APC could have a microwave power transmision system (similiar to raytheon's "active denial" pain-ray) installed to support the dismounted troops. Line-of-sight could be a problem, but that can be rectified with short-term batteries for when you temporarily drop out of sight and/or with a drone relay circling overhead. It would also be nearly silent since the hydraulics would be driven by an electrical motor, although a drone overhead might give away position (depending on its altitude and proximty).
Frankly, if this thing was worth a damn, it would be all over the civilian logistics industry by now.
You do realize that a lot of things that are now all over civilian uses got their start in the military.
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That thing doesn't even have power laces.
I hope they also find a way to transform G.I's into HULK. (A special "atomic" Big Mac may be?) Don't mess with Texas (or GEEzuss) or you got an enema! :D
Claude LaFreniere aka climenole
"break three inches of pine boards"
Big deal. I've punched through 11" thick spruce (stronger than pine) with my bare hand. In fact, I did three of them in rapid succession. Some martial arts training is as good as Iron Man. Hmm...
add a diesel engine to it, then you can add some armor because you'll have enough power and it's ready for a weapons system.
Of-course you are stuck once you run out of diesel
You can't handle the truth.
Not any more. That's what Hallilburton and their army of Indonesian slave laborers do, for only three times the price of a band of grunts. Soldier don't cook, clean, dig latrines, repair trucks, or configure radio systems any more, thanks to Weinburger and Rumsfeld that work is now all done by contractors.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Am I the only one thinking that suit is incredibly cool? It's not even "decorated" but I think it looks flashier without.
I mean, I watched and liked Iron Man, and seeing the prototype compared to Iron Man's armor, made the prototype look way cooler. Attack some weapons on the shoulders and you got pure scifi material!
Doing the "work of 3" is a poor comparison.
A forklift may do the "work of fifteen", but fifteen men aren't going to lift a pallet to the second storey of a house as easily as one forklist, then repeat the process all day.
"Force multipliers" mean you can deploy a smaller, more capable package of people and equipment that does things packages with lesser tech couldn't do in the first place.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Once someone cracks the battery/power source problem, we'll see armor and power assist devices become standard.
Which is good, till someone uses a sticky bomb or an RPG on the suit's power cell.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
old story is old
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
This is not the first time the defense industry got its ideas from a movie (or comic book).
Remember this classic idea for a plane-mounted laser?
To me, defense spending breakthroughs seem to be similar to the broken window fallacy.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Why? Because you don't like the fact that the nature of the world as it is today requires us to keep a standing military?
Um, you mean, we broke too many windows out there and they're now trying to break ours, right?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Defense spending and research predated the Bush administration by centuries, friend.