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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.
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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"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?
"Raytheon is seeking to develop the suits to help the US military carry supplies" Cue: Power Armour in 3...2...1.
With what power? Supply tossing makes sense since the suit can be tied to a supply truck via power cable.
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.
This is not exactly new, they've been working on this for a while now. The only thing stopping them from putting armor plating on it and turning it into power armor is the battery life of the suit. Even with the most expensive batteries we can manufacture, there's a maximum opperational time of about 30 minutes on the XOS-2 when disconnected from an external power source. Needing to be plugged in to operate sort of limits their military applications to grunt work and MAYBE defensive deployments. Still if someone can work out the power issues, functional and deployable power armor is really only a manufacturing run away.
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Export it to Japan and it's only a matter of weeks until the Knight Sabers become reality. :D
Considering that the proposed use right now is for faster cargo handling, the power could be provided by the truck hauling the cargo. The suits don't have a battlefield purpose yet, so tethering isn't much an issue when you consider that everything these are likely to be used for is within feet of a big vehicle of some kind.
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Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Buy one suit, military keeps it repaired for 20 years, 20 years of 2 people in the military > 1 suit.
No. I think you have it wrong... You seem to be mixing two thoughts
and
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
It also does not fly, nor does it rain hellfire.
Balderdash!
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.
Either fuel cells or a portable generator might make more sense than a battery. Both have a much higher energy density per mass and energy density per volume, plus they are much easier to refuel than a battery is to recharge.
Technically, the fuel cells needn't be hydrogen powered, since you can make a fuel cell that runs on hydrocarbons (which are easier to store and transport). A generator adds more exhaust and moving parts, but is at least proven technology. Either could work.
And for military applications, you don't need to augment arm strength, you can focus on the legs and torso. After all, if the intent is to add plate armour for battlefield use, then carry capacity is what you're after, not super-strength. Now, augmented arms would still be desirable, if only because it would allow for heavier infantry weapons (which you'll need once the other side starts fielding powered exosuits), but for the first-gen version you can skip the arms and just use existing rifles.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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).
That was implied to be a fusion reactor. I was actually impressed in the second movie where they made oblique references to neutron embrittlement, which is much more sophisticated physics than comic book movies usually get. Mind you, the rest of the movie's physics were still awful, but I'll cut it some slack given the source material and the desire to be faithful to it.
Presuming it was a fusion reactor, you can pretty much forget about seeing them that small anything soon. Fusion power plants scale up better than they scale down, partly as a result of the square-cube law, and partly as a result of components being hard to miniaturize. We don't even have building sized fusion plants that can produce more energy than it takes to achieve and maintain the reaction in the first place. We'll probably have working fusion power in this century, assuming we keep at the R&D and don't blast ourselves back to the stone age in the meantime, but I doubt we'll have it miniaturized to Iron Man levels anytime in the next couple hundred years.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
but it does use the power of the transistor.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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 XOS-2 exoskeleton, the perfect way to play minecraft in real life!
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.
In point of fact, exploding fuel isn't exactly a huge risk.
This is one of those areas where Hollywood is to blame for the popular perception. Every time a car goes off a cliff, every time a tanker truck catches a stray bullet, every time hydrogen is even mentioned, what follows is an impressive pyrotechnics display.
Doesn't work that way in real life. Mythbusters, who never avoid a myth involving kaboomery, have tested most of the fuel explosion myths and found them wanting. Fuel (gasoline, propane, hydrogen, diesel, etc) can catch fire certainly, but this rarely involves the instant towering inferno seen in film and on TV.
As far as that goes, it's not like the military doesn't use plenty of fuelled combat vehicles already. They know how to make them not blow up every time somebody with an AK cuts loose. Self sealing tanks and armour plating in particular mitigate the risk.
So I wouldn't worry about it. And if fire or explosion is a concern, I'd suggest diesel fuel for powered suits, as it doesn't ignite easily, and pretty much can't explode on its own.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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!
"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."
At about 200x the cost of 3 soldiers. It's carrying supplies. It isn't the Bataan death march for christ's sake. You don't go out on a patrol carrying a giant case of ammunition with your weapon on your back.
"It sure was nice the dude in the robot suit carried our rucks for the first 5 clicks before it broke down."
"Yeah. Sucks we gotta hump these fuckers for the next 20"
"Nah, we'll just put them in the humvee that was following him to supply the power for the suit."
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.
Bruce Lee was never a fan of board breaking for exactly this reason. Yes, if you line them up perfectly you can do this without the suit. However, as you can plainly see in the video, these were not lined up in this way, and were in fact compressed together in a vice. Maybe your suggestion is correct - they would have done well to stay away from the showmanship employed by 'martial artists' to break boards. But it seems to me that it wasn't necessarily intended to draw those comparisons.
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.
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?