DCAWD.com

robo-linky.

Looks like the robotic exo-skeleton has come a long way.





I for one welcome our robotic overlords...

(sorry, you knew that line was coming.)

get away from her you BITCH

Very cool Raytheon has been buying companies up pretty quickly as of late to gain IP. I wish I was working on something along these lines... would be fun to try that thing out!

So, wait. This thing takes soldiers and makes them marines?

I'm kind of surprised they haven't considered some of the more fundamentally important things. Humans are partially as useful as they are because they have digits. The suit in the video has hooks. The prototype suits they had mocked up certainly had hands (and could hold a rifle even), but this assumes robotic hands with the ability to bear loads (72lbs) with a thickness not much greater than a finger. Sure, it's possible, but it's a long, long way off.

The other thing that's kind of striking about the video is the upset center of gravity. If you look at the soldier carrying ammo cans, he leans over just as he would carrying it without the suit. So while it's mechanically capable of picking up a missile (their example, not mine), there isn't a chance of picking up and lofting a 1,000lb item if the combined suit and soldier weigh substantially less. The arms turn into a lever, and suddenly the guy's going to be on his face. Or the suit's. Either way, it's not very useful.

The remotely operated suit is interesting, but why bother retaining an anthropomorphic form? We've done a lot of work on unmanned ground vehicles (e.g., FCS), and the most successful approach seems to be creating purpose-driven robots since they're so much cheaper than people. So, you make a missile-loading robot and don't expect it to also do medevac or force recon.

It just seems really misguided. Even the "waldos" in Alien (Aliens? Alien3?) were more reasonable. Sure, they were huge and bulky, but for doing dockwork, it makes sense, and you'd need to be huge and bulky to move, you know, huge and bulky things around.

avriette wrote:Sure, they were huge and bulky, but for doing dockwork, it makes sense, and you'd need to be huge and bulky to move, you know, huge and bulky things around.

Hence the size of dump trucks... but I still think this is very useful. In all honesty, I see this as the first revision of something much more impressive. Something that will enable a soldier to jump 30ft, be protected from bullet's/shrapnel (when it's full encased) etc. etc. Does a soldier really need to be able to jump that far? No.... but when it's available, I'm sure someone will find a use.

avriette wrote:So, wait. This thing takes soldiers and makes them marines?

you just scored cool points with several of my buddies.

Sabre wrote:

avriette wrote:Sure, they were huge and bulky, but for doing dockwork, it makes sense, and you'd need to be huge and bulky to move, you know, huge and bulky things around.

Hence the size of dump trucks... but I still think this is very useful. In all honesty, I see this as the first revision of something much more impressive. Something that will enable a soldier to jump 30ft, be protected from bullet's/shrapnel (when it's full encased) etc. etc. Does a soldier really need to be able to jump that far? No.... but when it's available, I'm sure someone will find a use.

Wait, think about this the same way as the lever thing. Sure, it's mechanically capable of jumping thirty feet, but unless it jumps parallel to the ground, it's going to be falling pretty fast when it hits the ground. And, when it hits the ground, it's going to weigh 700lbs, or whatever (portable battery packs?? have these guys lifted a 17" laptop lately?). 32 feet per second squared, plus whatever speed it had before it jumped (can it jump that far from a standstill?). That's a lot of energy to cook off, and it's certainly more than most people can take without breaking a limb. How do you even hang on to handles that just "float up" when you're not using them? (which is to say, you're not strapped in) How do you keep the arms from pounding into the knee joints? The hydraulics/pneumatics just aren't there yet.

In all honesty, I wasn't too serious about the 30ft jump.... but, there are a couple of things that can help with that now that I'm thinking more about it. Hydraulics can bleed off a good bit of the energy and design makes a huge difference. I'm just thinking back to one of my projects as a freshman engineering student where we had to create a holder for an egg that would let the egg survive a 3 story fall. Turns out, it's not that hard (mine worked, haha).