The inevitable cyborg power-suit/exoskeleton

Remember Nintendo’s Power Glove?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYBzKFm-rd0&hl=en&fs=1]

I remember being retarded excited when my friend down the street got a Nintendo Power Glove.

I also remember him getting a lot more popular at school.

I think we were seven.

Needless to say, the idea of a technologically-enhanced human body has plenty of traction in the imagination of 7-year-old boys.

But it also has plenty of traction with grown men (and women).

Check out some of these vids…

—

Here goes Honda’s assisted walking thingamajig…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp4XUvgqkbU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

Here goes an ex-paratrooper paraplegic giving a robotic exoskeleton a whirl…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Bku_YZu3A&hl=en&fs=1]

Here goes Raytheon’s full body exoskeleton…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g&hl=en&fs=1]

And just for good measure, here goes a pic of an Armored Personnel Unit (APU) from Matrix Reloaded:

(image from here)

—

Popular Science has a little background on military-funded exoskeleton developments:

Besides a few non-military designs [see timeline photo gallery here], the prospect of an actual super-suit languished until 2000, when Darpa began a seven-year, $75-million program called Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation. By that time, a handful of exoskeleton champions—such as former Army colonel Jack Obusek, the director of human systems integration at the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts—believed that the technology had begun to catch up. Obusek, who has helped push for the military’s exoskeleton research since 1995, says the rise of smaller, more versatile sensors and faster microprocessors began to convince him and other officials that a wearable robot just might be buildable.

—

My male 29-year-old imagination has one question: at what point will they add jetpacks to these things?

Now I really wanna watch Ironman…

1. Track comments via RSS 2.0 feed. Feel free to post the comment, or trackback from your web site.

   Currently there are no comments related to article "The inevitable cyborg power-suit/exoskeleton".

1. You must be logged in to post the comment!