BLEEX — the Berkeley Lower Extremities Exoskeleton, with strap-on robotic legs designed to help people like soldiers or firefighters carry heavy loads for long distances.
I tell you what; they have got everything at World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. Thanks to a link from Aku-Aku, I read a New Scientist article about the development of a Japanese robo-exoskeleton. For 10 years Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba in Japan has been working on a servo-assisted “exoskeleton”, which he has dubbed HAL (Hybrid Assisted Limb or Locomotion).
Two control systems interact to help the wearer stand, walk and climb stairs. A “bio-cybernic” system uses bioelectric sensors attached to the skin on the legs to monitor signals transmitted from the brain to the muscles. It can do this because when someone intends to stand or walk, the nerve signal to the muscles generates a detectable electric current on the skin’s surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton. It takes a fraction of a second for the motors to respond accordingly, and in fact they respond fractionally faster to the original signal from the brain than the wearer’s muscles do.
While the bio-cybernic system moves individual elements of the exoskeleton, a second system provides autonomous robotic control of the motors to coordinate these movements and make a task easier overall, helping someone to walk, for instance. The system activates itself automatically once the user starts to move. The first time they walk, its sensors record posture and pattern of motion, and this information is stored in an onboard database for later use. When the user walks again, sensors alert the computer, which recognises the movement and regenerates the stored pattern to provide power-assisted movement. The actions of both systems can be calibrated according to a particular user’s needs, for instance to give extra assistance to a weaker limb.
The article also noted that the inventor has been inundated with requests from people with brain and spinal cord injuries as to the availability of such a device. I can identify with such requests as it is something that I have suggested after reading Dune long before reading this article or seeing a previous one about potential military applications for such devices developed by the Berkely Robotics Lab.
DARPA refers to these Starship Trooper devices as EHPAs (Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation) and is soliciting bids for such devices that will do one or more of the following:
- Assist pack-loaded locomotion
- Prolong locomotive endurance
- Increase locomotive speed
- Augment human strength
- Leap extraordinary heights and/or distances.
They want such machines, a.k.a., “mechas“, to be anthropomorphic and capable of bearing distributed loads, such as that generated by extensive armor protection, as well as typical pack loads.
A few strides later…
robots.net informs about a small, bipedal robot that can run about an hour on the tank of hydrogen. A Japanese robot company, Speecys Corp., claims it is the first robot to run on fuel cells. So, if a robot can have a fuel cell backpack, then one might assume that a robotic exoskeleton could include one, also. One might also assume that research is underway to make use of ultracapacitors when an extra, quick burst of power is required.
