TechStuff Sends Exoskeletons XOs

They're all in the science fiction genre, and there are a lot of futuristic technologies in those works that I find really compelling, from faster than light space travel, which I suspect will never be a reality, to flying cars, to a replicator that can make lasagna whenever I want it. Somebody invent that. But today I wanted to talk about one of those technologies that we're actually seeing evolve in

the real world, and that would be exoskeletons. Now, because of my age, when I think exo skeletons, I think of Ripley in the film Aliens, the second of the movies. She's in that giant cargo loader exo skeleton going toe to toe with the alien queen. But there are tons of other examples in science fiction, ranging from the industrial to more streamlined versions like Iron Man's suit. And we are not anywhere close to being able to build a suit like Tony Starks, but we do have some pretty

cool robotic exo skeletons out there. Some are intended to help people move heavy objects, kind of like the cargo loader from Aliens. Some are intended to provide support to give people with mobility issues more independence, Some are meant for people in the military to help them walk for further distances and carry heavier loads, and some are meant to encourage empathy and understanding in others. So today we're gonna look at the development of exoskeletons and their uses.

One thing I want to talk about right at the start is how developing exoskeletons is truly a multidisciplinary pursuit, And what I mean by that is that it requires the expertise of people in very different fields of study. One obvious one is robotics. Exoskeletons share a lot of common traits with robots, and robotic elements frequently are part of powered exoskeletons. But here's the thing about robots. Their

form doesn't have the limitation of the human form. Robots come in all shapes and sizes, Some aren't mobile at all the ones that do move may move in very different ways from the way we move. There are swimming robots, climbing robots, four legged robots, wheeled robots, robots with treads. An engineer who wants to build a robot has a lot of options and will likely choose whichever one's best suit the purpose of that robot. But we humans have

way more limitations. Our limbs only work certain ways, and if you try to make them work outside of those certain ways, well you might get some unpleasant crunching and breaking. And I have to admit, one of the nightmarish visions I have of an exoskeleton is one that begins to bend the opposite way of a human joint and just

you know, keeps going, which is yikes. So my point is that when designing exoskeletons, it is important to have people with expertise on the physiology of human beings as part of the team to make sure that the exoskeleton works with, not against, the person wearing it. Add to that the fact that we human beings are you know,

a little squishy, you know what. Admittedly, ever since I stopped going to the gem, I've become way more squishy and mechanical systems typically are very much not squishy, and sometimes pairing those things together results in bad stuff like people getting hurt, and has given rise to a discipline sometimes called soft robotics, or systems that can interoperate with

softer stuff like humans. So the development of an exoskeleton is an arduous process, and unless some of the people actually developing the technology are the ones who will ultimately use it, you also have the added challenge of making sure that the thing you're creating is actually useful for the intended audience or the intended consumer. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who, after I got my hands on a product, found myself frustrated because it wasn't

working the way I thought it would work. It worked the way the designers thought it should, but they didn't necessarily take into account how the end user, who was not involved in the development or production of this technology, was going to try and actually use this thing. Look, I'm saying, sometimes I get stuff and it's not dummy proof, so I find myself wondering how the heck to get it to work. And yeah, I'm being a bit glib,

but it really can be an issue. Designers can sometimes make something that doesn't really work for anyone because the designers got sidetracked solving one or more technical problems and didn't create something that is actually helpful. Now, that last point applies to any product really, not just exoskeletons. However, with exoskeletons you can see how it is particularly important. Designing and building even a prototype is incredibly labor intensive

and thus expensive. It requires a lot of time and research, and that is an investment, so you kind of want to make sure the end result is something worthwhile, even if it's not going to become a commercial product in the future. You want to make sure that what you're doing actually matters. And you can also think of exoskeletons as falling into one of three broad categories. There's actually a couple different ways we can classify exo skeletons, but one way is to look at what they are intended

to do. Are they upper extremity exo skeletons meaning stuff that helps with moving heavy weights using your arms and

your your torso. Are they lower extremity exo skeletons something that helps, you know, carry weight with the legs or the hips, or maybe helps correct some sort of physiological issue, or are they full body exoskeletons, you know, essentially shoulder to toe typically is what we're talking about with these things, and it's hard to pin down the earliest appearance of the idea for a powered exoskeleton, but one early example in fiction comes from Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, in

which human soldiers of the future are wearing power suits that enhance the soldiers strength and speed and other capabilities. Some might argue this is more an empowered armor category and not exo skeleton, but I maintain those distinctions are kind of meaningless in the real world, or at least outside the world of fiction. The earliest example I could find dates from a nineteen sixty one article in the

journal Armor, published by the United States Army. It's a write up in an news section, so it's sort of a series of headlines and not a full like feature in the magazine itself, and this particular little story has the headline future soldier human tank charming right. The opening sentence reads quote the soldier of the distant future will be a human tank equipped with power steering and power brakes.

The Pentagon said recently end quote golly. The project was also called Servo Soldier according to this news piece, and it wasn't announcing a new invention. It was rather talking about how the Pentagon and the Department of Defense were soliciting inventors for ideas that could contribute to this goal of creating a servo soldier. The suit was going to have a pretty amazing wish list of features, so enhanced strength check, enhanced speed check, enhanced resistance to stuff like heat, cold,

toxic gas, and than radiation check. The military experts acknowledge that there were one or two minor obstacles to overcome, like creating a way for the suit to interpret the moves of the soldier as commands, thus generating an output several times the strength of the original motion, like if you were to throw a punch, the punch would be way more powerful, for example. And finding a quiet, portable power source capable of generating at least four horsepower was

another challenge that they admitted to. And the name gives me a chance to explain just what a servo is. It's not just the surname of a plucky robot who riffs on bad movies Shout Out to Tom's servo. Servo is short for servo mechanism. The servo mechanism for an exo skeleton like the one the army was proposing, would be sort of like our muscles. They would connect linked parts of the exoskeleton and provide the motive power so that they could move or really to augment the movements

of who whoever is wearing the exoskeleton. So servos often find their way into what is called closed loop applications. A closed loop system is one in which there is a process that has an outcome and the state of that outcome then comes back to affect the process. So one example of this is a clothes dryer with a dryness sensor. So you throw some wet clothes into the

dryer and you set the dryer to to dry. The dryer tosses your unmentionables around while blowing hot air to dry them out, and a sensor stays on the lookout for signs of moisture. And so as the cycle is coming towards an end, the sensor is detecting if there's any moisture present, and if it does pick up that there's moisture, there the clothes are not really dry. It then feeds back into the system, and thus the dryer

just keeps going for a while longer. If the sensor does not detect moisture, then it says, okay, it's good for us to stop now, and the whole process stops. This is a closed loop because it relies on that

feedback signal. So a servo motor, at its heart is a device that rotates parts of a machine precisely and efficiently, so that rotation might be translated into a different type of motion, usually through gears of some sort, so that you have an element inside the servo that's rotating, but the part that you might see might be uh a platform that raises and lowers. But it can do so at a very precise distance and a precise speed, and that's it, which is pretty simple, right. They're able to

move at varying velocities and two different positions. But that differentiates servos from other types of motors. Servo motors have some form of sensor that measures the position of the motors moving components, and the controller that dictates how and when and how far and how fast the servocean move. So imagine a robot arm with a joint like an elbow, and imagine it has the same range of motion as

a typical human elbow. The servo motor would provide the force to extend the arm or to bend it back, and the sensor would detect precisely where in the range of motion the arm was at any given time, and the controller would be the element providing the instructions on what should be happening at any given moment. Now, there's a lot more to be said about servo motors, but I'll have to dedicate a full episode to explain them

in greater detail. For our purposes, it's good to know that it's an electro mechanical element that acts like a muscle, largely in robotics. Uh not, that's not the only application we find servo motors in all sorts of stuff, but in robots in particular, it is an incredibly important component. Uh It is not the only mechanism in robotics that does this, and I'm sure I'm going to touch on

several others in this episode. Now, I do not know how long the servo Soldier project lasted, or whether it ever got beyond the initial stage of just soliciting design submissions, but I do know the piece and armor came out a full two years before the first appearance of the comic book character Iron Man, and there were other attempts at creating exoskeleton technology as far back as the nineteen sixties.

A project involving the U. S. Army, the U. S. Navy, and General Electric or GE produced a prototype exoskeleton dubbed Hardyman h A R D I M A N. The goal for this project was to design a wearable exoskeleton that would give the operator a lifting amplification to a factor of twenty five. Now, that would mean you could lift a payload of one thousand, two hundred fifty pounds and it would feel like you were picking up a

fifty pound weight. In kilograms, that would be a mass of around five hundred sixty seven kilograms, but it would feel like a mass of twenty two points seven kilograms. That is amazing, and it goes right in line with that cargo load I mentioned from the film Aliens. In fact, if you look at images of this thing, it kind of resembles that fictional piece of hardware. So I imagined that when James Cameron was thinking about the film that the hardy Man design was one of the influences for

the cargo loader in that film. The hearty Man was technically two systems that were connected together. First, you had the pieces that connected to the operator. This is an internal exoskeleton, internal with perspective to the device, not to the operator. No one needed to have surgery performed in order to have this put on them, thank goodness. No, this was a skeletal framework that had more than twenty

five different joints. In fact, I found two separate web pages, both on g s own website, that gave the numbers of twenty eight joints and thirty joints, so I'd say somewhere in that range as a safe bet. Then there was a very large mechanical system that connected to this framework. So the mechanical system did not connect directly to the operator. You had this separate skeletal system that connected to the mechanical system, and then the operator connected to the skeletal system.

But the mechanical system was outfitted with hydraulic and electronic systems to provide the force needed to amplify the wearer's strength. According to some fairly sketchy records. The design team was able to create some form of feedback system, which is a really important part of this equation and one that really needs to extend all the way back to the

human operator. So in other words, imagine that you're wearing a suit, but there's no feedback, Like you can't tell the difference between pushing lightly and pushing really hard, So you wouldn't know if you were using enough pressure to pick up a heavy load, or maybe you might use too much then you damage whatever it is you're trying

to pick up. So in one case, you might try to lift something but because of the pressure you're using with your hands, the grip isn't strong enough and that's something slips from your grasp, which could be potentially very dangerous, or you're using way too much pressure and you actually

cause damage to the thing you're trying to move. Exoskeletons need a way to indicate to the operator what the interactions with the environment are actually like, there needs to be some form of feedback, whether it's audible, visual, or tactile. If it's a haptic feedback system, maybe a rumble system, so that way you can tell how much pressure you're using and the rumble increases in amplitude as you start

to add more pressure. Something needs to be there in order for the operator to have a sense of how much force they are using. And while the scant records on the Hearty Man suggested that the team found some solutions to this problem, they also don't go into any detail, so if they did find solutions to it, I don't know what those were. The Hearty Man never progressed beyond the prototype stage and reportedly it never had anyone inside it while it was actually turned on, not not the

full suit. Maybe parts of it, but not the full thing. There are photos of people in the suit, presumably the suit was off at the time those photos were taken. But the question is what went wrong? Why didn't this thing get further refined and go into production. Well, for one thing, the suit was just impractical. The suit itself weighed in at a hefty one thousand, five hundred pounds that's about six ms. Providing power to it was a challenge.

I'm guessing it required a tethered power line at the time, and it wasn't exactly the most stable of suits. According to reports, they had this tiny issue of quote violent and uncontrollable motion in the quote, which, as you can imagine, is not the best feature if you're putting someone in the darn thing. And so it never went further than the prototype stage. When we come back, I'll give a word or two about hydraulics systems, and then we'll continue

looking at exoskeleton projects. But first let's take a quick break. Okay, before the break I mentioned, I would talk about hydraulic systems and why they are used in heavy duty, industrial strength machinery. And this has a lot to do with physics, particularly the physics of specific types of liquids. Now, basically, hydraulic systems are using some form of pressurized fluid to

do work. So imagine you've got a pair of syringes and the first syringe is filled with a liquid and it's connected by a tube which is also filled with liquid. There's no gaps there, and this is connected to an empty syringe. But this second syringe has its plunger fully depressed, so there's nowhere in the system. Right, You've got a fully filled syringe with liquid in it plunger fully back. You've got a tube filled with liquid connected to the

end of a second syringe. With its plunger fully depressed. If you push on the full syringe is plunger, then the plunger pushes against the liquid, and the liquid in turn pushes against the plunger on the empty syringe, and it pushes that plunger outward as the first syringe empties. So fluids like water don't compress very much, so when you push on them, they transfer that force in whatever direction happens to be available. In fact, they press outward

in every direction without diminishing the force. But if the fluid hits an unyielding edge, then the pressure will act against that space at a right angle. This is called Pascal's law after Blaze Pascal. And practically what this means is you can apply force to a small amount of liquid and get a lot of power as an output as you get a proportionally bigger force on a bigger area.

And in the example I just mentioned, you can easily imagine reversing this process simply by picking up syringe number two that is now full and pushing down on its plunger, forcing the pressurized liquid to push back against the plunger of syringe number one. And there are several parts to a typical hydraulic system, but that's not super important for

this episode. I've done a few episodes talking about hydraulic systems and greater detail in the past, but the important things to remember about hydraulic systems is that they can generate a lot of power output, they can do very heavy duty work with a relatively small amount of input required, and hydraulic machines can lift heavy payloads, so they are

often part of heavy duty industrial equipment. We're talking about stuff like construction machines, you know, cranes and bulldozers and back hose and that kind of thing, and they are part of heavy duty exoskeletons as a result as well. And I should also mention the difference between hydraulic and pneumatic systems. Hydraulics rely on pressurized liquids, and again, those don't compress. Pneumatic systems are kind of similar, but they

rely on pressurized gas and gas does compress. So hydraulic systems are better for those super heavy duty functions and they are incredibly precise, but they are also slower than pneumatic systems. Pneumatic systems are better for smaller applications that don't require as much force or precision, but they do require faster action. So there are two different technologies that work on similar principles, but you would want to choose one or the other based upon whatever application you had

in mind. While ge produced a powered exoskeleton that was potentially too dangerous to put someone in when it was you know, actually on, a team at Cornell led by Neil Maisen was working on a different design called the man Amplifier, which yikes, anyway, that name seems pretty loaded to me. But the concept was similar to gas approach, although it was meant to be much smaller and it would also rely on hydraulics and servos and it would

also amplify the operator's strength. The team designed the underlying exoskeleton, which was the part that would attach directly to the

operator's body. This was the unpowered section. They never reached a point in which they were able to add powered components to it, but designing just the skeletal structure itself was a big deal because they had to figure out, how can we do something that would support weight, How can we do it so that it moves with the operator, and that it uh it interferes with the operator's range of movement as little as possible, and those are all

conflicting priorities. There's no easy way to satisfy all of those requirements. Over in Europe, at the Mahilo Institute in Serbia, Professor Miomir Vukabanovich led efforts to develop a wearable system that would replicate the walking gait of a human, with the ultimate goal of providing assistance to people who had

limited or no mobility in their legs. The work in that field would also advance our understanding of bipedal robotics systems in general, meaning that while the goal was to create an exoskeleton to give mobility to people who might otherwise not have that independence, it also contributed to our progress towards bipedal robots, you know, robots with two legs that are capable of maintaining their balance and also moving through environments. This is easier said than done. It's actually

incredibly difficult to achieve. So the reason why this is such a hard challenge is that you've got to think about what walking actually is. You know, for a lot of people, walking is just something we can do without really thinking about it. You know, you just you just do it. But if you want to replicate walking, you have to figure out what walking really is from a physics perspective. You've got to figure out stuf off like

momentum and balance. You have to marry a stable repeated phase that is moving the legs in a pattern that the works and creates a stable, you know system. But you also have to do that within the context of an unstable phase. And by that I mean Bipedal walking is essentially a series of shifting our balance forward so that we're falling. Walking is just falling and catching ourselves over and over by extending a foot and then we

catch ourselves with that foot. We shift our weight and our balance so that we continue our fall forward, but we catch ourselves with our other foot. Now, this process is natural to us. It is easy for us to do, and we don't feel like we're falling, right, We're just

pushing ourselves forward. But if you were to try and replicate that in a machine system, you literally are having to cause the machine to fall forward and then catch itself over it over again, And that requires you to figure out how to do things like maintain balance, how do you maintain speed, how do you allow for stopping, how do you allow for the change of direction. I mean,

all of the acceleration forces are really tricky. And one concept that Vukabanovich put forth was what he called the zero moment point, and this describes a condition in which there is no horizontal movement or moment I should say, and the feet of whatever the bipedal devices are in contact with the ground, but there's no horizontal motion, and there's sufficient friction between the foot of the bipedal structure

and the ground so that there's no slipping. So, in other words, this is the condition in which a bipedal structure is stable with regard to horizontal movement. It's it's standing still essentially. And again that sounds really simple, but it's it's actually pretty tricky to achieve, especially if you know you don't have full control of the environment. So if the ground is not perfectly level, for example, this

is harder to do than it sounds. The early example from the Mahilo Institute was a pneumatically powered exo skeleton system. The institute would continue to pioneer work in robotics and robotic exo skeletons, and we would see continued interest in developing such devices to aid people with mobility issues. Over in the United States, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Madison developed a walking robot EXO skeleton that also aimed to help people with limited or no motor function in

their legs so that they could walk. There's a video showing this and two other robot designs that's pretty fascinating, But the version of that video is pre programmed to carry out the same basic walking sequence, meaning it was a very early stage of a useful exo skeleton. It was either on or it was off, so you're either

walking or you were not. Such a device would just allow someone to walk in a forward motion, but it would be incapable of doing other things like climbing the stairs or letting the operators sit down in a chair, or even changing direction. However, you've got to walk before you can lounge, as the old saying definitely doesn't go. But more seriously, researchers were having to get a deeper understanding of the nature of the challenge before developing solutions

to address that challenge. And this is a typical part of engineering. You have to define what the problem is before you can create a workable solution. And we were still on the stages of defining the problem. The early work and exoskeletons was fascinating but also illustrated the limitations of the time, some of which still remained to this day. Computational resources in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies were

scarce and mostly restricted to mainframe systems. Power sources were large and frequently immobile, or at least practically immobile, and a lot more research needed to be done to develop mechanical systems capable of replicating the motions that come naturally to the typical human. Now that's not to say that there weren't other examples of exoskeletons in the following years, but really we started seeing some major advances a couple

of decades later. So we're gonna skip ahead. Just know that there was a ton of work in this space that I'm skipping over. But otherwise we would have, you know, a twenty episode long series here. So countless engineers, scientists, inventors, doctors and more added to our understanding and our capabilities in robotics. And that's what would make the exo skeletons I'll talk about next a real possibility Without their work, I wouldn't have anything to say in this next section.

So so in the late nineteen eighties, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or I E E E or I Triple E, or as I like to say, I he created the first International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics. To be clear, powered exoskeletons are just one manifestation of the concept of rehabilitation robotics, which aims to quote propose cutting edge solutions to boost the rehabilitation process, providing robotic assistance to address and speed motor recovery, trying to unveil the

mechanisms underlying brain plasticity end quote. So we saw a lot of conversions at this time in various fields that aim to leverage robotics with regard to medical and physical therapy applications, including advances in robotic prosthetics. So again, there's a lot of work going on that would the advances

in different approaches slowly make their way into other applications. So, rather than attempt to go through a timeline bit by bit, I figure it would be best to talk about some of the other exo skeletons that emerged over the last twenty years. In two thousand one, a company called Hocoma introduced a technology meant help patients undergoing physical therapy in gate training. In other words, learning to walk in a way that's safe and efficient that you know, allows a

patient to maintain balance and not exhaust the person. So patients who had experienced a neurological event like a stroke can use this technology to train themselves to walk again to maintain balance. The technology is called Loco matt l O k O m A T and it includes a treadmill and a special exoskeleton harness apparatus that assists patients in regaining the ability to walk. There are videos online

showing it in use and it is incredibly remarkable. This particular technology is meant to help people regain the ability to walk. It's not an example of an exoskeleton one might use outside of physical therapy because it is dependent upon the harness and treadmill, So this is not something that someone would get fitted for and then use in their daily life. This would be something that someone would

use whenever they would come in for physical therapy. Another example of a technology designed to help people recover and gate train is the TIBI on bionic leg This device evolved from an earlier model that was a powered knee orthosis. An Orthosis is a brace or other device that provides support to joints that helps correct some disorder of a limb or provides strength where you've lost some strength in

that joint. The original device was really meant to help patients recovering from knee surgery so that they could build their strength back up during physical therapy. But after receiving some feedback that the device might be able to help people who had had a stroke, for example, trained to walk again, the company went to the drawing board created a more advanced version. This would be the bionic Leg,

and it's like a mechanized brace for one leg. It includes a pressure sensor that the patient wears in their shoe, and a computer accepts input from physical therapists so that the therapist and the patient can fine tune how much weight the device will support, and the sensors that keep track of the legs position and orientation will allow the machine and the patient to work together. And it's also

a pretty nifty application of this technology. There are lots of other examples of exo skeleton technologies that have been used in medical applications. Here in the United States, the FDA, that's the Food and Drug Administration, has approved three different exoskeletons as often. I couldn't find more recent records of this, but for treatments of patients who had suffered spinal cord injuries,

there are three that have been approved. Those three are the XO gt XO is spelled e K s O UH, the Rewalk Exo skeleton, and the Indiego Exo skeleton Indigo is I n D E g O. The technologies all share a similar goal. They provide the support necessary to allow patients the opportunity to regain mobility and to rehabilitate. And it's hard to stress exactly how important this is.

From a physiological level, these devices can help people build up their strength and endurance without that initial enormous hurdle they would have Without the support. Physical therapy can be grueling and the progress can be really slow and psychologically that's really discouraging. But having a device that can help stabilize and support a patient is immensely helpful. The patient can continue to work toward progress without having as large

an initial challenge. Now they're still putting forth effort. I mean, that's the whole purpose is to help the patient build up strength. So you don't want to take all the load off, you just want to make it more manageable so that progress is easier to come by. And the fact that patients can see results very quickly, you know, almost immediately, even if those results are due to the support of this technology, is a big boost for emotional states, right,

and that positivity is important the technology. It's a real benefit to the quality of life, and it encourages the patient to continue in physical therapy and to continue to make that progress. When we come back, I'll talk more about industrial and military exo skeletons, as well as a special suit that in a way is meant to provide the opposite experience to the medical ones I just mentioned.

But first let's take another quick break. One thing I haven't really covered is the development of unpowered exo skeletons. There are exo skeletons that don't have motorized powered components. These used devices like pneumatic breaks, which is similar to what you would see on a pneumatic door closer if you've ever seen a door that has that lever, And there's usually like a rectangular box at the top of

the door. Those things are meant to pull a door closed and it's These are actually meant to help mitig the spread of stuff like smoke and fire, as well as to close secure doors so that they lock back in place. They might also require springs. That is, EXO skeletons that are unpowered might use springs that can hold tension on parts of the exoskeleton providing support. This is similar to stuff like the microphone boom I'm using right

now at home. It's an arm that has the springs that allow it to hold tension so that if I position the arm in any particular way, it maintains that position. Uh, same sort of thing with EXO skeletons. They're EXO skeletons that use springs to do this as well. Exo, the company that I had mentioned earlier, has a few of these unmpowered exoskeletons that use this kind of technology. They don't have motors, they don't have computer chips or anything

like that. They rely purely on physics to balance loads. Uh. There are models that include leg attachments that ultimately place weight on the ground below the operator. So imagine that the section that you slip your feet into and has a little bit of a stand that ends up transferring weight to the ground itself, so the person carrying the load using the exo skeleton doesn't feel like they're carrying the load. That weight is transferred through the exo skeleton

to the ground below. People who use heavy machinery like heavy tools can wear one of these and have much of the weight of that tool transferred to the exoskeleton, and because there are no motors or anything like that, the operator can control all the movements. Um there's a reduced need for maintenance, so it's much less wear and

tear on the device. There may be. In fact, there probably is reduced range of motion with these, so it's not like it gives you total freedom, but it does mean that you trade that for the ability to carry really heavy stuff for a really long time without it feeling like you're carrying heavy stuff. I've seen these things

also take form like in steadicam type riggs. Steadicam riggs allow camera operators to put potentially very heavy cameras on a mechanical arm that attaches to a harness worn by the operator, and the camera would typically be too heavy and bulky to hold out like this, particularly for a long time. But the harness distributes the weight more like a backpack would, and the arm provides support. There are other elements that allow camera operators to get those smooth

gliding shots like that famous sequence and Good Fellas. But I've done an episode on steadicams in the past, so I'm just gonna move on. But let's get back to powered exo skeletons. I want to talk about a genius named hammaun katz A Rooney. Uh. He is a scientist and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

And I'm sure I've totally mispronounced his name, and I apologize to him for that, But Casar Rooney played an integral role in pioneering research starting in the nineteen eighties, really in exoskeletons. He was a founder of XO, the company that I've mentioned a couple of times now, the ones that create the XO g T and UM also

those unpowered EXO skeletons I was just talking about. He led many R and D efforts to create exo skeletons to boost upper body and lower body capabilities with goals ranging from aiding workers doing difficult physically demanding jobs to helping people regain the ability to walk, and he helped create exo skeletons that could aid people to walk great distances so that they could do so without exhausting themselves. And his team developed the Human Universal Load Carrier or

HULK incredible huh uh. HULK is an EXO skeleton that was designed to allow the wearer to carry a significant amount of weight, with the EXO skeleton taking most of that load, so a person wearing the HULK could carry up to two hundred pounds of stuff with the device

providing the lifting capabilities. The EXO skeleton is made from titanium and it weighs fifty three pounds all by itself or around and that's without the batteries that are needed to actually power the thing, and as a twenty kilometer range of operation before needing a recharge, and that would be if you were to operate it at a walking speed of around four kilometers per hour over level terrain.

The muscle, such as it is of the EXO skeleton is provided by the hydraulic system and a micro controller on the EXO skeleton self provides the brains needed to make sure that the system is moving in concert with the operator. More on that in a second so Exo Bionics sold the rights for the Hulk to lockeed Martin, and lockeed Martin continued the development of the exoskeleton in

cooperation with the US military. The goal was to create a portable system that would allow US soldiers the capability of carrying heavy loads without the enormous amount of exertion it would typically require while walking over terrain. Unfortunately, the design ultimately proved to fall short of these goals. As an actual use, it appeared that operators would become exhausted despite the exo skeleton, or really, I should say because of the exoskeleton. That it wasn't necessarily the load they

were carrying that was tiring them. It was literally trying to move inside this exo skeleton and getting it to do what they needed it to do. So the Hulk failed to perform up to expectations, but engineers and researchers learned a lot from the process, and the work with exo skeletons would continue. Generally, there's still some big challenges to overcome to make exo skeletons for military use of practicality, and you can think of the designs for these exo

skeletons as falling into two broad types. Remember earlier I mentioned you can divide exoskeletons into different types of categories depending on your point of view. Well, in this case, we're talking about rigid exo skeletons. These are the ones that use stuff like titanium for the frames. They have the actual sort of skelet toll structure, and these exo skeletons only have flexibility at specific joints, and thus whomever is wearing the exoskeleton is limited in their movements by

whatever degrees of freedom the exo skeleton has. So if the exo skeleton cannot bend a certain way, then the operator can't bend that way, So typically that means there's a reduced range of movement. These types of exo skeletons also offset weight in some way, meaning the person wearing the suit can usually carry more than they otherwise could.

But the suits are also harder to move in like the Hulk was, so the person wearing it might tire out quickly anyway, not because the weight was too heavy, but just moving in the suit by itself requires a lot of effort. I mean imagine wearing like a big diving suit and moving around. The resistance you would encounter would wear you out pretty quickly, so the savings you get an energy by having the weight offset might be

lost just by moving around in the suit anyway. The other type of exo skeletons that I wanted to chat about our flexible body skeletons. These are soft exo skeletons, not the rigid ones, so these do not use the

frames that I was just talking about with the previous type. Instead, they consist of things like cuffs that you might wear around your limbs, like around your upper and lower arms or your upper and lower legs, and they typically attach back to some sort of backpack or other component that has cables attached from that component to the cuffs, and

these cables can increase or release tension. There's a motor in that in that component, typically a backpack, that can either increase or decrease the tension on a cable to a cuff, and this allows the flexible exo skeleton to provide a bit of a performance boost to someone who's wearing it. The cables are meant to kind of act as an assist or your muscles. So when you walk, the tension on a cable would match the extension and contraction of your muscles and take a little bit of

that workload off of you. So when your muscle is pulling, the cable can pull to adding a bit of a boost. It's kind of like giving someone a bit of a push on a swing. Uh, same sort of concept here. But these exoskeletons are not designed to offset any weight you're carrying. They don't make it easier for you to

lift heavy things. In other words, they provide that small boost in performance if you're doing something like having to walk a long distance, though typically they work best on level grounds, so this capability is somewhat limited already anyway. But on the plus side, they're not as heavy as the rigid body style exoskeletons, so wearing it doesn't, you know, mean that you're putting on a two pounds suit or something. They also don't fight against the operator usually in any way,

so they're a lot more comfortable to wear. But on the con side, they don't help you if your goal is to allow people to carry or operate heavy stuff, so their use case is a little bit limited. The development of a versatile exo skeleton that can be used in military applications continues. Some elements of design have found their ways into other military applications already, but as I mentioned,

a truly practical exoskeleton hasn't really taken form yet. Over in the industrial world, we've seen a lot of designs that could work in areas like construction or manufacturing, primarily in applications where speed is not as important as safety and precision. In those cases, these devices can be particularly helpful if you're not worried about having to react quickly, and you're just worried about making very safe, very precise movements,

then we got you covered. I want to close this out by talking about exo skeleton style suit I got to wear once upon a time, and it was back when I was writing and hosting the video series Forward the King. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can go to YouTube and search fw thinking and the series should pop right up. I did a bunch of shows about futuristic topics, some of which have probably not aged so well because it was a few years ago.

In fact, the exo skeleton video I was talking about was shot way back in two thousand sixteen, and the future rarely plays out the way we anticipate it well. But one of the topics was about a very special type of exo skeleton that I got to put on at CES. This one was not about enhancing someone's abilities, but rather working against the person who was wearing it in an effort to build a sense of understanding and empathy for others. It's called the R seventy I Suit

from gen Worth. Now gen Worth is not your typical tech company. In fact, it's not a tech company at all. It's a long term care life insurance company. So they actually ended up licensing this technology from another UH organization. But they saw the need to teach younger folks understanding understanding about the challenges that elderly people often face. This helps illustrate the need for stuff like long term care insurance plans, but motivations aside, let's talk about the technology.

The R seventy eye suit consists of a rigid body exoskeleton that has points of articulation at major joints like the knees, the hips, the shoulders, and the elbows. There's a helmet with a head mounted display and headphones as well as another component, and it also has a pretty hefty backpack that houses the computer system that helps run everything. The whole purpose of this technology is to simulate the

various effects of aging. So if you were to put one of these on, and I can speak from experience, an operator could wirelessly change elements of that suit as you're wearing it to make your life more difficult. A head mold display in the helmet shows images from a pair of cameras that are mounted on the front side of the display. So imagine you've got a visor, and on the front of the visor, facing the outside world

are a pair of cameras. You're looking at a screen that is a video feed of those cameras, so you're seeing a live video feed of the world around you. However, that means the operator can actually change things in the image digitally so that you are affected in suboptimal ways. So your vision might dim, or the operator could simulate something like a cataract and you would get a blurry, faded, white out spot in your vision, and so making out stuff ends up being a lot harder. Those headphones also

make things more immersive. The operator can reduce the amount of volume that you hear, so you'd be picking up audio from microphones, but they could reduce the volume of that audio so it simulates hearing loss. Or they could turn up a high pitch sound to some reulate the experience of developing tonitis, which actually already have a little bit of tonitis already. So this was a sobering prediction of how things are going to be for me in

the future. The rigid Exo skeleton has motorized joints, you know at the elbow, shoulders, hips, knees, and those can actually increase tension and torque, making it harder for you to move. And that can simulate anything from the experience of muscle loss, which is a thing that a lot of people go through as they get older, or the development of conditions like arthritis, or what it might be like if you've had to have a joint replacement, like a hip replacement or a knee replacement. And it is

a really eye opening experience. But I want to warn you speaking about eye opening experiences, if you go to YouTube and you look for the specific episode of forward thinking, you're gonna see fat Jonathan, possibly at his fattest, so I look like a blue sausage that's been stuffed inside an exo skeleton. It is not my most uttering video by a long shot. However, it was a really interesting experience. So if you want to see it, that's fine. Just don't tell me how fat I was. I already know

how fat I was. I've lost a lot of weight since then, and the tech really worked. By the way. I really did experience a lot of frustration as I tried to complete simple tasks or even just to interpret what was being said to me, and experiencing that gave me a bit of insight into what it's like for millions of people around the world every single day. I mean,

that's their daily experience. It's one that I don't necessarily share right now in my own experience, but knowing that's what it's like made me feel a lot of empathy and compassion towards those who have to deal with it every day. It's tough, man. There are a ton of exoskeletons out there that I haven't really touched on, from the medical tech to the industrial stuff to other military applications. But we're still trying to tackle those pretty basic challenges

I outlined earlier, maneuverability, power quirements, practicality. I think the power side might end up being the toughest nut to crack ultimately, I think some of the other ones might be easier. But you know, we see other technologies progress at a much faster rate than our ability to find solutions for stuff like making better batteries. There, that's just it's just a slower process to be able to to do that. You know, the improvements we make are there,

but they don't tend to be dramatic. They tend to be very incremental improvements, so they aren't keeping pace with some other advances. However, a breakthrough could always be right around the corner, and I'm sure we will revisit this topic again in the future. In the meantime, if you guys out there have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Reach out to me on Twitter or Facebook. The handle it both is tech Stuff H s W and I'll tell to you again really soon.

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