I Am Iron Man

know we had day is the day. Yeah, there's so many examples in science fiction, and I mean I personally love lots of them, like the Loader and Aliens. While it's entirely just this huge functional thing that's meant to allow a person to load heavy material, yeah onto a spacecraft. I mean that's just a simple example, but it's still really awesome. It's so great because in terms of the construction of the narrative, it's one of the best sci

fi versions of Chekhov's gun Yes in movie history. When Ripley uses it early on to you know, show up the dudes who think that she can't do anything. She's a girl. There should totally be a little a little caption that flashes underneath that scene saying this is important. Yeah, and then of course later, oh, that's just the power. Don't don't say the line. Don't say the line, of course, Uh yeah, power, so many exoskeleton. Everybody loves iron Man,

iron Man. Well, okay, until two thousand eight, a small number of people loved iron Man, and now everyone loves mostly Robert Downey Jr. Also, I guess iron Man. Yeah, well, Robert Downey Jr. Lives his life as if he were Iron Man, or at least Tony Stark. So but we've got other examples. Uh see Master Chief's armor, the Spartan arm, which is arguably a little bit like a cyborg because I don't think that you could take that guy out

of that suit and have him live, right. It's it's a combination, right, there's an exo skeleton element, and then there's also the cyborg element of the or at least the genetically modified slash cyborg element, because they do have the AI that can go into their brains. Right, But but it certainly does. That suit certainly gives him or her. There are lady Spartans true superhuman abilities. Yeah, there's uh,

there's there's of course, Metroid Classic Samas, Samas Sammus. Well, if you say Samus, who answers is going to yell at you and say say Samas instead, I would I would argue that many of these examples are also based on some classic sci fi examples, like Starship Troopers, which was in fact a book before it was a really terrible film. I think you mean, terribly awesome film that's

not at all what the book I believe had. It had exo skeletons that didn't show up in the movie, right right, They didn't even show up in the movie. Oh that's why I hated that movie. Cavatar had them. Giant Mex, I mean, Max are essentially exo skeletons just turned up to eleven. Yeah. Okay, so by grouping all these things together we can sort of get an understanding of what an exo skeleton is. It's a suit that

you put on over your body. It doesn't replace your body, but it's sort of augments your body amplifies what you're able to do in some way, which is exactly why RoboCop is not an example of an exo skeleton. Okay, we we had a quick discussion before the podcast went live because apparently there was a correction that we needed to address on something unrelated to this podcast. I wouldn't

call the discussion quick, but please go ahead. At any rate, the discussion was specifically about and ask Someone made the assertion that RoboCop in fact is wearing an exo skeleton. That's clearly not the case. Someone was under the mistaken assumption that RoboCop was wearing an exo skeleton. Uh, not correct at all. RoboCop is a human head and I think maybe part of a torso, but that's irrelevant with a robot body cyborg. Yeah yeah, if he's pretty, it's

pretty Frankensteiny. Yeah. Yeah, So an exo skeleton would be if RoboCop was a regular cop who was a dude who would walk in in the morning, put the suit on, and then go out and fight crime, that would be an exo skeleton. Yes, so let's talk about some real world exo skeletons, because here's the thing, this is just science fiction, Joe, real world I'm talking about you can go out and put some of these on right now. Not only you could buy one, you could buy a

couple of these. Yeah, I mean, if you have grand

laying around. I got to hear this, all right. So there are lots of different types of exo skeletons, which I kind of arbitrarily divided up by the tasks they were intended to perform, because again, you know, an exo skeleton in general is meant to augment your abilities in some way, although in some case says that augmentation is really more for the purposes of entertainment, which is the first category I chose because the mainly because the the I couldn't imagine a use for these first two exo

skeletons beyond impressing people by the fact that you're walking around in an enormous exo skeleton, I mean, which is a pretty high impressive factor. Yeah, it's not practical unless you just want to impress people. So if you're in l A and well okay, and they have they have slight uh, they will slightly improve your your grip strength or your really these two maybe maybe they do. I don't know about the Team Skeletronics one, because that one

was based solely upon human power. There's no you know, a lot of the suits we're gonna talk about today are powered suits. Right, they have an additional power source that you have to carry around with you or you're tethered somehow, because some of these are in prototype stage and aren't you know, standalone devices. Even with pure mechanical levers. Um this one that you're about to talk about can give you about twice your normal strength from what I've

read on the internet. Oh wow, So skeleton Yeah, this will be the I think I said skeletronics, but Skeletonics rather Team Skeletonics UH is a group that created this this uh, purely mechanical exoskeleton, meaning not power, not power. It's powered by human So it's human powered. So if you've ever seen one of those like in the old cartoons, the boxing glove that's on the various kind of like accordion style uh system of levers and so it can extend really far out and then come back. That's kind

of like the basic building block of this thing. It has all these little interconnecting levers that leverage your movements to make them bigger in the form of this exo skeleton and in fact makes you a little bit taller. Yeah. They stand about eight ft two inches tall, which is about two point five meters. Now, Lauren can you imagine towering over the world at eight ft two and it's delicious.

Lauren is already Oh they were. They were originally designed by this team of like high school slash college prep students in Okinawa, which is even better, I think because it was built by kids. Yeah, and they look hilarious, like they look like something I said, they looked like something from aperture science labs, like Portal Games. Yeah. Yeah, the big kind of bulbous white section looks like a hilarious clumsy science experiment. Yeah, you're you're kind of walking

on these stilts. I mean, and they're and they're well balanced stilts, but still it's nonetheless, it's still to me. I'm a big fan of puppetry. My sister is a professional puppeteer. So the first time I ever saw one of these on a video, I've never seen it in person, but when I saw it in motion on video, the first thing I thought is, Oh, that's a puppet. It's it's a giant puppet. And that's really more or less

what this one is. It's a giant puppet. Not I'm not belittling it, because again I love it's really cool. Um and you could this is one of the ones you could actually go out and buy today. Yeah, for the low price of undred dollars um you can totally purchase one, or you could rent one out for parties. Wow, I totally tell one of these at a party. Now, I gotta have a party in Tokyo, so I can have my very own Exo Skeleton performer come in and

maybe make like Exo Skeleton balloon animals or something. Imagine the the wich fingers would pop them more entertaining. Yeah, that'd be fantastic. So that that's the first one we wanted to talk about. Another one that's kind of similar, In fact, some would say similar to the point of they totally stole the design is a Sagawa Electronics Powered Jacket m K three. So this one, let's stand for Mortal Kombat three. Not to my knowledge, it would be terrible if you as soon as you put on the suit,

you just finishing. Oh the things are about to go bad now in this case Sgala Electronics. The name the powered Powered Jacket m K three gives a hint already that's different from the first one, right, it does actually have supplemental power that goes to it because it actually has several servos and team to be precise, that would

control some of the movements. So instead of you moving your arm up you know, ten inches so that the the the robot, the exo skeleton arm goes up you know a larger amount based upon the size of the exo skeleton. In this one, you would be using controls to make certain things happen, like turn the wrists or open or close the hands. Uh. Their marketing approach is whimsical, although that whimsy led to led to a great deal of marketing success there, there was a lot of controversy

when they debuted. The company started up about a year and a half after Skeletonics and UM their suit went up for sale a sing gold day after the Skeletonic suit did. And it I mean they have basically admitted that the mechanics are based on the Skeletonic suit. If you look at the two, you can see the similarities between them. They're not like the power jacket looks like it's a smaller form factor, but it's very much the same shape. Oh sure. UM, and and they are pretty

proud of those of those electronics in there. UM they say that the motorization allows for much smoother motions. But it's something it's been a little bit of a of a sticking point that due to this whimsical marketing um that that they have enjoyed slightly better success. Yeah, y'all watched the demonstration video on the site. It is so weird. It is so weird and funny that I was looking at this like, are we mistake? Is this just like

a prank? It's extremely tongue in cheek. Um. You know that the announcer on this thing has this really silly scar bakeup. Yeah, he's got all these uh, these fake scars all over his face where you just assume that this was probably something that he, uh that developed after an unsuccessful prototype test perhaps and the persona that he's doing is is a little bit aperture science actually, Like

it's like it's very strange. Yeah, they suggest like you used the thing for battle that you you know, they've got these like dramatic scenes. It's very weird. Yeah, Yeah, it's certainly it's certainly more on the entertainment side. I would argue then a lot of the other ones we're going to talk about today, but yeah, I wanted to get those out of the way because while they are entertaining, I honestly can't see them being used practically to do

something that otherwise you would have trouble doing. Jonathan, where's the power loader? From Aliens? So is that real? Yet? I would argue that the power loader at least drew some inspiration after a real piece of technology that never made it into production. It never made it all the prototype stage because it was never it never worked exactly the way it was supposed to do. But there was

a prototype powerloader. There was a prototype powerloader by G. E. G. E built a prototype powerloader type device in nineteen Really, it was developed in the sixties and early seventies. They were working on it for multiple years trying to get this thing to work called the Hardy Man H A R D I M A N. This thing is Have you seen the pictures? Did you guys? Look at the pictures. It looks like it was, you know, the inspiration for

the powerloader. It looks like a transformer that was originally a refrigerator unfolded to have arms and legs and have a person inside it. It's not extremely elegant, is what we're saying. So this thing had some pretty incredible goals.

You know, it was it was funded by the US military. Uh, so you've got the military behind it looking at something that could allow it to move huge amounts of of payload, you know, in various applications, and it could, uh in theory, allow a person to lift up to pounds or six that's heavy. Yeah, yeah, something something about twenty five times, like like you would only feel a pound for every twenty five that you lifted, right, which is pretty amazing.

Had twenty eight or it was supposed to have twenty eight movable joints, and it itself weighed hundred pounds. I mean, this was no spring chicken. This wasn't something that you're gonna lightly jump up the side of a cliff, you know. So very heavy, very bulky, had large hydraulic arms. Uh. And ultimately it suffered from a lot of different problems

that made GE eventually shelved the project. So they had problems with power management, like how do you actually power this thing where it's not tethered to a giant generator? How do you make sure that all the joints move properly. They eventually built an arm that you could put your arm inside and lift around. Uh. Center and fifty pounds,

which is pretty impressive. However, according to at least one source, the legs gave them problems, and that when they try to activate, like try to build legs where it would you would be able to walk around in this thing, because clearly you're gonna be able to wear just the one arm if it weighs about some of the pounds. Yeah, you need something that I gotta rip your arm off

at the at the shoulder. Yeah. Because these things were mounted on like big pedestals in the testing phases, you know, it wasn't It wasn't like in final form, So trying to build the legs and make them work. It said that that any attempt to get its legs to work resulted in a fit of mechanical st Vitus dance, which would mean that you would have no control. You would suddenly have this stomping, rampaging robot beast that's you're inside. At best, you would be witnessed to a terrible amount

of destruction as you flailed around. At worst, you would be turned into a human bendy toy. Yeah. I had the question, is it worst to be inside it or outside it? Yes? I don't think anyone WINSUM. But anyway that that if you go and look at the designs and we'll link to some stuff on our social network platform so you can kind of get a look at this. It's really an impressive attempt at building a working exoskeleton.

It just didn't get there all right, Well, I mean we didn't quite have the power sources or the circuitry that could be small enough to really be lightwright enough to really function at that point in time. But but the basic idea of it is what basically everything that we're going to be talking about today is based on being that there are it's really too exo skeletons. It's it's it's one that you wear and then one that um and an outer one that's connected to that inner

one that translates the motion. Yeah, and you have to remember also that it's easy for us to ignore this because we don't really necessarily think of it as intelligence. But this is totally part of artificial intelligence. Absolutely. It's teaching computers how we humans move and the range of motions that we can do and the range emotions that we need to do in order to complete certain tasks. That's all part of artificial intelligence. It's not just how

humans think, it's how we are able to do everything. Well. Your motor skills are part of what your brain does, right, right, We just don't normally think of our motor skills as part of intelligence. You know, if we're think, if we're talking about intelligence, often that we overlook that and and the algorithms necessary to receive that input and translated into motion without injuring you or your surroundings are pretty pretty complex.

This is this is really complicated stuff, which is part of the reason why it's taking so long to get an exoskeleton that you know, kind of matches what science fiction has has portrayed. Even in the more rudimentary implementations of exo skeletons, it's not a trivial task to both teach a machine how to move and also miniaturize all the components and get a form factor that works. But people have continued to work on it, and we've seen

some pretty incredible implementations. For example, there's the company in Japan called Cyberdyne. But let's okay, quick, Joe, what significance does the name Cyberdyne have in science fiction? Cyberdyne is the name of the corporation and the Terminator franchise that

creates sky Net and the Terminator robots. Sky Net is the super intelligence that decides to wipe out all of humanity, I think, originally designed to command their missile defense program, also creates Terminators, creates T you know, T one thousands, all the all the Robert Patricks, all the Arnold Schwarzenegger is all the what's her name from Terminator, So I'll just pretend that didn't exist. So what you're arguing is that perhaps the name Cyberdyne is not the most does

of killing all humans. Okay, But but here's the thing. Here's the thing. They're actual their actual exoskeleton has a totally different name. I'm sure it's gonna solve all the problems. It's named how okay. How of course, being from from the Bucking Film to Space had another exam intelligence that tried to kill humans. Yeah, so it's got the Cyberdyne hall.

So I mean, what can go wrong? Um No, But this this is a company that was founded by a professor from the University of Tokuba named Dr Yoshi Yoki sun Kai. And uh I thought you were gonna say, like Professor Blofeld, not quite, it's exactly his name was. No, never mind, anyway, we're not gonna we're gonna not gonna make this even more ridiculous. So, uh, the professor founded this company, and he actually has very altruistic goals according

to the website. Anyways, he really wants to create an exo skeleton that can quote that's intended to rather a quote for the benefits of humankind in the field of medicine, caregiving, welfare, labor, heavy works, entertainment and so on end quote. So they are looking at lots of different purposes for this, including using it to lift heavy things in a repetitive of way to avoid injury that you might suffer either because you're lifting something that's really heavy or that you have

to do a repetitive task uh throughout the day. You know, these are things that can easily create either acute or long term injuries in people. And the idea would be this particular kind of exo skeleton would take on a lot of the weight of whatever task you're doing. Right. Um, it actually hypothetically feels weightless while you're wearing it, and it works by picking up your your nerve signals subcutaneously

and interpreting them into motion. Uh, they've They've also built a couple of models that are radiation shielded, presumably for work in a houkachima and clean up sites like that. Yeah. In fact, if you look at the one that has the radiation shielding on it, you can start to see maybe why someone might think RoboCop was an exo skeleton. Yes,

even though that's not correct, but very RoboCop issue. I would argue that that the design of many of these are starting to be cross influenced by some of these media portrayals. Oh sure, yeah they' There is no doubt that at least some of these designs are trying to kind of capture that same feel of various media portrayals, not all of them. Some of them are very utilitarian. They're specifically designed just to do what they're supposed to do. And we're just about to talk about a bunch of that,

yes we are. Uh so, those are the cyber Dine one and the G one are the two that I listed as uh, industrial exoskeletons meant too, they were meant to try and help in these kind of work tasks. I got the military is working on these, aren't they, You know, you'd be right. First of all, of course, we mentioned in the g E one that that was funded by the military. Another military funded project was the Berkeley Lower Extremity Exo Skeleton or BLEAKS, which was funded

by DARPA in two thousand. It was specifically meant to help soldiers carry heavy loads on long marches. Right like that happens so soldiers have to do all the time.

So if you have to get a bunch of people with who are carrying a lot of equipment to a remote location where vehicles are not an option, then this is a way of offsetting that weight so that the soldiers are not exhausting themselves just getting from point A to point B. So that was the basic um premises of the basic the basic task that they had when

they were trying to create these things. They're also looking at them not just for soldiers, but for first responders like firefighters who might need to carry quite a bit of equipment themselves in order to get to a remote location to be able to fight a fire. You know, you can't always get a fire truck there or all the other equipment that they need to be able to help people in that kind of situation. So this was a way of creating something that would support that weight.

And again you're looking at kind of a harness, uh, harness that has various methods of offsetting weight and creating its own amount of energy to supplement what you have so that you can more easily carry a heavier load. It's the basic idea. Also, I don't know if you guys got a chance to watch the video, did you. I saw pictures, but I didn't watch it in motions.

So yeah, I watched the video, and I've written in my notes here and I'm not gonna say it the way it is in the show, because otherwise I will blow out the microphone. But it's whisper why I said's

it sounded like you're wearing a snowblower. I mean it was maybe maybe not for stealth missions, but but but but the way it's working here technically is it's it's got this pair of powered legs and the sensors and the legs and shoepads figure out what you're doing, and then hydraulics in the system do all the heavy lifting for you. It should hypothetically let you carry seventy pounds and feel as though you're only carrying five. Interesting, Well,

that's pretty awesome. There's another example of military harnesses UH and Exo skeletons called the Exos two. Now, grant, there was an Exos, so it's not like they just started with Exos two. Know that the first one was more of a concept than anything else. It's still kind of in that phase. But this was developed by company called Sarcos, which was eventually acquired by Raytheon and now is a division of Raytheon. It's one of their their research and

development divisions. UM, and they got a contract from DARPA to develop a powered exo skeleton suit again for the military. So the Exos, the original Exos designed by Steve Jacobson, was pretty cool, large tethered suit that could um could care could pick up a pretty impressive amount of weight.

But then in UH they debuted the Exos two and they kind of tied that in with a film that was coming and they well, they they connected the first Exos with a movie called Iron Man, but Exos two they connected with another movie, Iron Man too, so UM, but it was a smaller, lighter, more streamlined unit than the original Exos and UH again pretty impressive if you ever watched the video, right, I mean it could do stuff. Yeah, it could repeatedly lift some two pounds, you know, for

for a few hours on end without getting tired. The machine apparently it made it feel like it was just ten pounds. The pilot, that's what they called the operator, was able to lift two hundred pounds and said he did. He would do fifty reps at a time and say like, yeah, the only reason I stopped because I got bored. Yeah yeah. Or or could could punch through three inches of solid wood, right, yeah,

so you could. This is where you get into that that fighting robots kind of approach, the Rockham sockem deal, which is kind of cool. Or kick a soccer ball. Yeah, actually I saw him punch a soccer ball out of the air. They toss a soccer ball to him and he went Although that's actually I mean, that sounds ridiculous after those other big, heavy, heavy kind of things, But that's really cool to have a machine that can do both those heavy things and something delicate like not obliterate

a soccer ball when you hit it. Well, it also can move fast, right right, I mean that's the other thing, like if you think of exoskeletons. If you think of something like the loader from Aliens, you imagine something that's moving super slow, right, it's taking these these kind of you know, anytime you think of a giant thing, it's moving at this really slow pace, you know, kind of lumbering like an elephant or something. But it turns out

that this particular exoskeleton you can move pretty fast. And in fact, that's another thing that the pilot liked to

show off. He would do jabs and even used a uh like the speed punching bag and show off that you could move really quickly just as you know, essentially just as quickly as you could without the suit on a little bit, but you could still move a lot faster than you would imagine wearing something like this, and that in part goes to show how advanced the computer systems are, because they would actually study the kinetics of all the human movements to make sure that the suit

could keep up and keep pace so that you're not like limited to the super slow kind of approach right right. Um. As of as of its released back in the company was working on decreasing the power needed for for the suit by making these really efficient serves UM so that it could use a combustion engine instead of hydraulics, which would make everything UM so much lighter and cheaper and you wouldn't necessarily have to be tethered to something. Yeah.

The next one is UM. Well it's not iron Man based, it's hulk based. Okay, so it got gamma mutated. Yes, it was. It was actually working on an experiment. Was No, it's not the nothing incredible hulk that's spelled that way. It's h u l C. Yeah, the Human Universal Load Carrier and Lockeed Martin is the company that has designed this,

which was yet another military exoskeleton and UM. This one is supposed to allow soldiers to carry around two hundred pounds or for up to twelve miles or twenty kilometers on a single battery charge, meaning that you would be able to carry this two pound pack and uh, and it wouldn't you wouldn't feel all that weight on you. It's another hydraulic system, but it's untethered and it's a titan.

It's made of titanium and also modular and design, which is really important if you're in the military and you have a failure of any part of your suit and you need to switch it out. If it's modular, then that means that you have a much greater capability of doing that on the fly. You might need not have to, you know, dismantle the entire suit in order to fix it. Now, you would require that you carry spare parts obviously, so that might be something that's in that two hundred pound

packet carrying. UM. If it turns out that the whole suit weighs two hundred pounds and all the spare parts way two hundred pounds, then I guess it would mean that you're just carrying another suit. But yeah, you might as well carry a second hulk. Yeah, why not? That would be incredible. Um this one I I found that they've done a lot of testing about the wearer's metabolic rate through through their oxygen consumption, which was pretty fascinating.

They found that wearers oxygen used decreased by about five to twelve percent, and that's without a load. With with a load it got with an eighty one pound load to be very specific, UM it got even better. The the oxygen use decreased by by on average, so UM, which basically just means that it is effective at decreasing exhaustion over a period of time. Right, So essentially you could say, like, this person is not breathing as hard as they would if they in fact had an unassisted load,

like they were just carrying it all on their own. Interesting. Uh, And then we get into this is actually my favorite use of exo skeletons because I find it the most inspiring. I also think it's the most likely to occur within the next say, five to ten years. Yeah, that we're talking about medical exo skeletons. Exoskeletons that are meant to help UH patients and therapists together to be able to treat lots of different issues. So one of the one ones I want to talk about is LOPES, which stands

for lower extremity Powered exoskeleton. And if you're thinking, wait a minute, those words don't make the word lopes. They get a little creative with the capitalization that. But it's meant to help stroke survivors train themselves how to walk. So people have suffered a stroke and have mobility issues as a result of that often have to go through a really long period of physical therapy just to regain

some portion of that mobility. And the idea is that this particular powered exoskeleton would would aid a stroke victim in making those steps to retrain themselves so that eventually they be able to have those mobility that mobility regained without the use of the exoskeleton. So the goal of this one is that eventually the patient no longer needs it. Um. It's also, as the project points out, beneficial to therapists

who often need to jump in and help people and phone. Yeah, like, the patient may suddenly, uh start to to fade and need physical assistance right then and there, and the therapist has to come in and end up taking on that weight to safely lower the patient or get the patients somewhere where you know that's they're no longer in danger of getting hurt as a result of falling down. So this can contribute to the therapist becoming exhausted or injured

in some way. So the idea is that with this particular kind of exo skeleton, the patient, all that weight gets taken on by the exo skeleton, not the therapist, so it could in theory help both the medical practitioner and the patient, which I thought was really an interesting way of looking at it. This is a project that is constantly looking at bringing new people on to kind of develop the program further, and it's very similar to some of the other ones we're going to talk about.

For example, Argo Medical Technologies came up with Rewalk, which is their name for their medical exo skeleton. Um Argo Medical Technologies was founded by Dr Amitt Goffer, who in fact is a quadriplegic and wanted to develop up an exoskeleton that would allow paraplegics to regain the ability to walk. So this is for people who have suffered spinal injuries and other injuries that would prevent them from being able to use their lower extremities. So it's against an exo

skeleton that's going to support their weight. Uh. They generally are using crutches along with us to maintain balance because there's only so much that these can do right now. I assume that maybe in the future will get to a point where, because of advanced gyroscopes, we may even see a time where where most people won't even need the use of crutches. That's not the case right now, um. I mean, obviously that would require incredible finesse on the

part of the mechanics. Right some of some of the projects that have been coming out of Honda's development labs have been kind of sort of working towards something like that, right, but and and some of the one of the other ones will talk about kind of is leaning towards that direction too. So this EXO skeleton is already in service right now, mostly in Europe. There are a few places that use in the United States, but technically it's awaiting

FDA approval for a widespread rollout. But it's even just to test stuff like that, you actually have to have really extensive checks and balances and regulations in place exactly, and they're having to write these regulations on the fly. I think that Europe has is a little bit ahead of the curve um versus the United States. Right. Yeah, anytime you're talking about anything that has a medical claim, the f d A has oversight of that and you have to meet the FDA's criteria before you can start

to market something. So in this case, this one is being used for physical therapy as well as allowing people who otherwise would not be able to get up and walk around to actually do that. And it's pretty incredible stuff. Uh. There is now a new device called the rewalk Personal relatively new. In two thousand twelve they launched it. So the rewalk Personal is meant to be a day to

day device, So that would be something that paraplegics could use. Uh, you know, they could actually have that along with a wheelchair. So most of the devices were talking about there in a testing phase where it's just in a research facility. Maybe they partner with the hospital and they get um a volunteer, perhaps a paraplegic to volunteer and test these out. But this is one where someone could actually get one of these devices for themselves. And then we've got the

vendor built powered exoskeleton, which is kind of similar. This one comes from the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics, which is probably the coolest center name I have ever seen. So it's another lower body powered exoskeleton designed to help people who have suffered spinal injuries be able to walk around again. And it weighs twenty seven pounds which is about twelve kilograms and has been tested on people that way up to two pounds or uh. These controls are actually very

similar to the way the segue is controlled. You know, if you're on a have you guys ever written a segue. I've never been on one, but I've read about how they were. Okay, I've I have written on a segue. I'm glad that video is not online because um, there is a learning current, believe it or not. And I did not fall off. Um. I very nearly veered well outside of the segue driving range into heavy foot traffic. This was a Disney World where heavy foot traffic is

part and parcel. R Jonathan, did you kill someone? The tears ran freely that day on Disney World. No, I didn't hit anybody, but I did. I did definitely have a few moments where I was afraid I was about to veer well outside of the area. I was good, but it was comical to watch anyway. The point is, the way you you drive these things is by leaning right.

The ideas that you you lean forward as if you were going to take a step, and then that that's how the segway knows to move forward, and then if you start to lean back, it will be a breaking my mechanism. Very similar set of controls are on the Vanderbilt Power Exo skeleton, where leaning is what gives the the Exo skeleton the information that all right, this is

what I need to do. So for example, if you're in a seated position and you lean forward, that tells the exo skeleton that you want to extend the legs and stand up. So a paraplegic with crutches for balance could lean forward and that would then tell the exo skeleton to extend and then the paraplegic standing up, and then the paraplegic can lean forward and start to walk forward, and if they want to slow down, they start leaning back.

So it's a really kind of cool example. It's very similar to that, and one that was on display at c E S two thousand and fourteen. I did not attend the particular press event where this was shown off, but I got to see video later and I'm so upset that I wasn't there. But the XO U e K S O U XO, sometimes called the e Legs I, was shown off at two thousand fourteen, another lower body exo skeleton designed to give paraplegics more freedom, more more

options when it comes to moving around their environments. So the version they showed at c E S, there was a guy in it who was using crutches and the controls for the exo skeleton. We're in the crutches themselves, so he could control when the exo skeleton would take a step. Yeah, so it actually has three different phases

in this. The first phase is that you have a medical practitioner who actually initiates when each step is taken, so in other words, a second person is there and will work with the patient to learn how to use this device. The second step is when you get the crutches that have the controls built into them, so the patient has the complete control of the device itself. The third step is where it's very much like the Vendorbilt powered Exo skeleton in that again, by leaning you give

the commands. So now the commands are built directly into and these are different mode that you can put the exo skeleton into, but you can engage this mode and then the commands are all on the shifting of weight, and so you would no longer be activating it through the crutches. You would do it by leaning and that would tell the exo skeleton which way to move. And it actually has a secondary phase within that that gives

it even more subtle control. It's pretty cool stuff. So all of these obviously are meant to give some uh some more options for physical therapy and just mobility for people who obviously otherwise would have very limited options. Um And, like I said, the video from CS two thousand fourteen, Now, this this featured a guy who's been working with them for more than two years, a paraplegic who's been working

with him for more than two years. But showing him walking around on stage, you could hear gasps in the audience. Because this is a technology that while it's been around for a while, you know, outside of a few reports, not a whole lot of people know about it, right, Like, I've seen a couple of news reports where it's almost treated as you know, uh, here's that last interesting thing before they go to the next program. And meanwhile, I'm thinking, this is so amazing and it's a whole half hour.

This is not the really big bunny from down the street. I want to I want to know how this works. I want to know how it's transforming lives. I want to know what the future applications are. I want to know how, ultimately something like this could give a person who otherwise would feel like they had lost all of that capability to get it back. I mean to me, that's like an amazing story and really really uplifting. And and you know, of course, these exoskeletons, they're getting better

and better each generation. They're finding better ways to to maximize efficiency, to create more intuitive control systems. So my hope is that we see even better versions of this down the line, and that we start seeing them used in the other applications we've talked about, where you know, it's it's more than just a proof of concept, it's an actual thing that people are using that is increasing our capabilities. Yeah. Yeah, letting a firefighter rescue people better,

that's pretty cool. Yeah, and letting letting me join up with my buddies to form Vultron. I just have tiny demands. Alright, So, uh, anything else on exo skeletons you guys want to talk about. I think that the possibility of you getting utterly crushed inside of a Vultron esque machine is pretty high. I thought you were gonna say, like, it's enough for me. I thought you were gonna just say I thought she was just gonna say is really funny. So I, Joe

and I are on the same page here, alright. So, guys, that wraps this up. Remember go to f W thinking dot com. That's where we have the podcast, blog post, videos, all sorts of stuff. They're all about the future that you definitely need to go check out and remember be part of the conversation. Join us on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. You have to handle fw thinking. We look forward to hearing from you and we will talk to

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