Talk:Powered exoskeleton/Archive 1

Old comments

Should this page actually be listed under Powered Suit or Powered Exoskeleton? Also, there not exactly fictional. Power-assisted exoskeletons have been developed since 1948, when a Russian biomechanicst named Nicholai A. Bernstein thought up plans for an above-the-knee, electric-motor driven prosthesis to provide movement to casualties of war, but was never implemented.

The first functional exoskeleton was built by G.E. in 1968 and was called the Hardyman. It's closely resembles the Aliens Power Loader and is hydraulically powered. The problem with the design was that it's hydraulics required almost a room of pumps and bladders.

The Russians experimented with a few more designs, but a Yugoslavian scientist named M. Vukobratovic came up with the first anthromorphic exoskeleton to restore basic movement to paraplegics in 1972. A similar product named Gehhilfe by the German prosthetics company Otto Brock was also developed for the same reason in 1990.

Today, there are several projects towards a cost-effective and reliable powered exoskeleton. Tsukuba University's HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) project aims to provide assistance to impaired patients. Berkley's Lower Extermity Exoskeleton or BLEEX is a similar project, but is also being developed for military applications. Kanagawa Institute of Technology's Keijiro Yamamoto's Power Assist Suit (a New Scientist article also goes into detail on Kanagawa's Power Assist Suit) takes an unusual approach by using computer-controlled air bladders and is being developed for use with nurses to care for Japan's aging eldery.

BTW, there should be a mention of the different control methods: Master-Slave, Electro-Conduction, (currently fictional) Direct Neural Induction. YoungFreud 04:27, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The Guyver may (I am unsure) not truly count as an exo-suit. Rather, the host and armour fuse to form a unique lifeform = the Guyver. It isn't something worn. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.144.111 (talk) 18:17, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

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Who is that guy that has his own suit that can withstand the force of a bear? I believe he's in Canada and has several suits worth a few million each.

• That suit wasn't powered. It was just really protected. --Aqua 22:43, Jan 26, 2005 (UTC)

That doesn't answer his question though. He wants to know who that guy is. 64.236.245.243 14:46, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

His question about an armored suit is inappropriate for a powered exoskeleton discussion page. Simply Google bear proof suit. You'll get your answer.--ColorOfSuffering (talk) 06:35, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Erm...

"Bubblegum Crisis, probably the definitive Japanese "mechanized armor" series, features vigilante/mercenary women making use of powered armor with large phallus-shaped helmets, symbolizing the deeply patriarchal nature of Japanese society and culture."

http://perso.numericable.fr/~netoyeur/divers/mangas/bubblegum-crisis_front.jpg

Now you go and tell me where THAT helmet is supposed to be phallus-shaped.

Uh, look at it from the side? From the front it appears to have a heavy overhang.

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"There is a general difference in style between Japanese-style and Western-style powered armor. Japanese powered armor tends to be sleek and more refined, with the equivalent of a car's outer body to cover vital internal systems. Western powered armor is much more modular and rugged in appearance; internal machinery is left partially or entirely exposed, granting easy access to systems for rapid maintenance and repair, as well as making it easier for an operator to custom-modify a design."

I don't know, but these lines bug me a bit. I don't really like the national attribution to the two styles, as I've seen examples of both the "sleek and refined" style and the "modular and rugged" design in Japanese and Western designs, rendering any attribution moot.--YoungFreud 21:11, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Although admittedly it's a generalization, there is a demarcation in design philosphy/design. You have noted that there are examples of either kind; these are exceptions; i.e. a Japanese anime can use "Western-style" powered armor, and an American scifi can use more sleek "Japanese" powered armor/"Mecha", but this doesn't change the fact that they are more generally used in one field or another.--->I'm not saying it's a "national" attribution at all. It's just that western scifi doesn't tend to use Mecha as much as Japan does.

I could accept an reintroduction to the paragraph, as the two styles and the examples do need to be said (I think BGC needs to get back here, but it would do better as an example of "sleek-and-stylized"). I'd use the paretheses like you did here for the styles ("Western-styled") and/or recognize it as a generalization. I might also include the links to the real robot and super robot, as the seperation in Japanese anime heavily influenced the break-up of "Japanese-styled" powered armor. It's said that Kunio Okawara designed VOTOMS to look as if they could be made now (i.e. 1970s-80s) using mass industry, and others have gone for the realistic-looking and modular powered armor such as Studio Nue (Starship Troopers and MADOX: Metal Skin Panic), the designs of Yukata Izabuchi (Patlabor, Gundam 0080, and Gasaraki) and Hajime Katoki, and Kow Yokoyama's Maschinen Kreiger ZbV 3000.--YoungFreud 22:45, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The Armored Troopers are too big to be powered armor, but too small to be "real robot" genre. The VOTOMS are about 3.9 metres each, and they have trouble in passages that are of human size. I recall the main character using a large cargo elevator to take his VOTOM through a building. When inside the human-sized passages, the movement of the VOTOM was impeded by the tight fit of the corridors.

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+++ Sidenote +++

The Hardyman built by G.E. has a possible homage in a 1995 Stephen Norrington movie called "Death Machine". As part of the movie's premise, a fictional CHAANK Armaments Corp. was developing a project called "Hardman", where listed MIA combat vets were brain-wiped, and loaded with combat skills via some type of neural interface, and fitted into a electrically powered exoskeleton, suprisingly similar to Tsukuba University's upcoming HAL-5 (electric motors at the joints, computerized backpack, plastic buckles to hold it in place).

That wouldn't be the first one. A Hardyman-style powered suit is displayed in the Matt Helm spy film, The Ambushers, and the power loader from Aliens is widely derived from the Hardyman project.--YoungFreud 05:02, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Article structure

I don't really like the structure of this article. May I suggest that the first section be about powered armor in real life (attempts, research, concepts, reasons etc.) and the second section be about powered armor in fiction? Beowulph 22:33, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Hardiman

I created the page Hardiman when it didn't show up in a search.I see it was discussed on this talk page however.I don't know if I did any good with it though,it might need to be merged with this page.--Technosphere83 23:44, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Powered armor

I don't think this is a good title when talking about general powered exoskeletons. Powered armor is only one application,Hardiman was never intended to be used as an armor.Neither is the HAL.

Powered armor should be a sub section if anything else.--Technosphere83 10:13, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

I think powered exoskeleton should not redirect to exoskeleton, but have this and the hardiman articles be combined under powered exoskeletons. and if one day there is real use of powered armor, then we can break that off as a new article then. --1698 19:58, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Moved to Artificial powered exoskeleton

I've gone ahead and moved the article to Artificial powered exoskeleton, since that is what the article is about. I've also started the merge from Exoskeleton. ··gracefool |☺ 03:29, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Rewrite

So, I did some sorting, it looks a bit more structured now. Do you still think it should be rewritten? --Koveras 21:11, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. It doesn't need a complete rewrite anymore, but it still needs a lot of work, especially of the real-world stuff. There are weasel words in the intro, and there could be a lot more written about real-world research. A picture of BLEEX would be good. ··gracefool |☺ 22:44, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Handicapped

Until I edited this article, it don't mention the possible benefits it maight have for people like Stephen Hawinkg.Myrtone (the strict Australian wikipedian)(talk)contributions

Image

This image at the top of the article is awfully amateurish; are we really sure it's from DARPA? I'm skeptical that a conceptual artist working for them would produce such an amateurish image. It'd be appreciated if someone would find a better image to place here.

       - Isn't it from a videogame?

I don't think that DARPA is going to spend a whole lot on art. --Theredstarswl 03:22, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Thats a real image from darpa, see the sarcos video at the end of the section. My complaint now is that the first part of this article looks like boiler plate from theyshallwalk.org and there is nothing about sarcos except for the video link. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.237.70.115 (talk) 06:47, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

RE: Samus' Power Suit

Technically, she can somersault and jump to high heights without her Power Suit, as seen in Metroid:Zero Mission. It's mainly there for life-support, weapons systems, and increased moobility and defense. It's a bit of a minor,nerdy edit, really.

Do we have any solid sources on this? I mean, we can see her abilities in a game, but what we really need is some sort of technical documentation from Nintendo to verify the features of the suit. Zero Mission is rather silly when she is out of her suit, because she somehow manages to keep all her energy tanks and everything. Even if she could naturally jump that high, the energy tanks should have been part of her suit, not part of her body! I don't think we should treat that bit of Zero Mission as authoritative. -- Lilwik 09:03, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

This article

..starts by mentioning that DARPA are looking into it, and then spends three Bibles listing all the damn manga flicks where an exoskeleton has appeared. I propose a split with one stub dealing with actual exoskeletons and one list dealing with the cruft. Joffeloff 23:31, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

I feel similarly about "first concept" sentence:

The concept first appeared in fiction in Stratemeyer Syndicate's Tom Swift and His Jetmarine novel and was later popularized in science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers. 140.109.169.15 11:03, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

In my (admittedly humble & subjective) opinion, the article really starts out on a poor footing. That definition in the first sentence is self-referencing. It reads that powered exoskeletons belong in a subset of themselves determined by usage. The statement that "most of the technology needed to the make concept viable is readily available" is qualified by the exceptions of control, power, and motive elements. The only additional element that I can think of would be protection/life support (so maybe it could be two). Either way MOST of the elemental concepts remain to be solved (according to the the information in that first paragraph). The most that I can make out of the first paragraph is that although no PRACTICAL implementation is yet to enter production, the concept itself has not yet been shelved as impractical. I guess there is not much of a middle ground between impractical and pretty darn handy. Maybe that could be a good starting point for then highlighting all the fictional implementations as opposed to the dearth of actual applications. 203.202.144.223 02:23, 3 April 2007 (UTC) Oops, sorry, wasn't logged in. LowKey 02:26, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes. This technology looks much more useful for old people who tend to fall over than for soldiers, lets start there. That separates the powered and exoskeletal elements of it which the article is titled as, from the powered armour aspect which it isn't - if one wanted to write about the powered armour Johny Rico of Starship Troopers fell in love with, call the article "powered armour". Coriolise 13:31, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Why Artificial?

Are there any natural powered exoskeletons?

Not for humans. Natural exoskeletons are like the shells on lobsters, and crabs, or the exoskeletons on insects. I wouldn't call them "powered", but they are natural. 64.236.245.243 14:45, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree. The "Artificial" should be dropped from the name as natural exoskeletons are not powered. --Dunkelza 18:46, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

HEV suit

Does this really qualify as powered armour? As far as I'm aware it provides a layer of physical armour and an additional shield generator, but does it actually augment the wearer's strength in any way?

The HEV suit is generally left in the background, a sort of explanation for anyone wondering why a scientist might fight hordes of super soldiers on his own. It's been debated as to whether it has a helmet or not (Half-Life 2 features a "suit zoom," yet the helemt is never shown in any art). Sprinting and holding your breath in game drain the suits energy, suggesting that it supports these functions.

Its more like a life support system, he cant lift loads heavyer than a normal guy plus the name means Hazardous Eviromental Vital Suit. In otherwords it is just a souped up armored hazmat suit, not powerd armor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.176.81.1 (talk) 14:31, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Research speculation edit

I am going to take out the paragraph that begins, "Powered exoskeletons however will be probably be screened out..." because it contains somebody's speculation and doesn't belong in the section on research. (It also makes me wish people who get all their exposure to sf through popular video games and movies would read a book once in awhile, but that's neither here nor there.) Transentient 20:08, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

More Real Life Examples

This article is merely a stub for real and fictional powered suits. The two topics should have different articles. Also there isn't much research done on the real powered suits as there are lots of projects going on and only a few are mentioned. Maybe its a matter of updating this article but Bleex 1 and Bleex 2 are not mentioned and from some of the online research I found that Sarcos has also a second model its testing. Sarcos however is keeping its second model under wraps. Japan has also a few projects going on. This outdated link http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct05/1901 has much more info on exoskeletons than this wiki article has. 24.83.178.11 03:50, 31 January 2007 (UTC)KnowledgeSeeker

The Trojan

Troy Hurtubise made a modern full body suit of armor called The Trojan. However, it isn't powered but it might be worth mentioning in the recent developments section. It seems like a step in the right direction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPS2l5fQ55A 65.40.239.99 18:13, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

starcraft

Don't the protoss use powered armour as well?

Yea they do. Zealots, and Dragoons. Malamockq 23:32, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Also the Terran Marines and Firebats. anonymous —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.251.129.237 (talk) 20:55, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Technically, they seem to be more bionics more so than "powered armour", considering one of the Zealot upgrades augments the joints in their legs, allowing them to move faster, with no armour alterations. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.214.174.237 (talk) 12:10, 1 April 2008 (UTC)