Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science

Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/build...

Building the Real Iron Man While audiences flood theaters this month to see the comic-book-inspired Iron Man, a real-life mad genius toils in a secret mountain lab to make the mechanical superhuman more than just a fantasy w ith the XOS Exoskeleton By Gregory Mone Posted 04.09.2008 at 11:11 am

Man Meets Machine Exoskeleton test pilot Rex Jameson greets XOS maker Steve Jacobsen John B. Carnett View Photo Gallery

Afghanistan. A hidden bunker. Four men with rif les guard a thick, rusted steel door. Bam! A huge f ist pounds against it—f rom inside. Bam! More blows dent the steel. The hinges strain. The guards cower, inching backward. Whatev er's try ing to break out is big. And angry .

The door f lies open, and a metallic giant bursts through. It looks like a robot but, hidden inside, f amed weapons designer Tony Stark maneuv ers the mechanical beast. Bullets bounce of f the suit, barely denting his armor. He lev els the guards with one swat. Outside, he stares down the enemy camp around him, switches on the f lamethrowers in his arms, and roasts the joint.

Utah. A secret mountain lab. Sof tware engineer Rex Jameson backs into a headless metal suit that's hanging f rom a steel I-beam by a thick rubber cord. He clicks into the aluminum boots, tightens belts across his legs and waist, and slides his arms through backpack-like straps, gripping handles where hands would be. It looks as easy as slipping into an ov ercoat.

Then he mov es, and the machine comes to lif e, shadowing his ev ery motion. He raises his f ists and starts f iring sharp jabs while bouncing f rom one f oot to the other. He's not quite Muhammad Ali, but he's wearing 150 pounds and he looks light.

He could easily knock a nearby coder to the f loor, or f ling one ov er a desk—but ev en more impressiv e, he could do it all day . To show of f his superhuman endurance, he walks ov er to a weight rack and y anks down a bar loaded with 200 pounds. Then he does it again. And again. He stops somewhere around 50, but he's been known to rip through 500 reps in a row. Ev en then, he quits out of boredom, not f atigue. Video: The XOS Exoskeleton in Action It's f antasy v ersus reality , and the spread is shrinking. The latter, the XOS, is the latest and arguably most adv anced exoskeleton in existence, dev eloped by one-man idea f actory Stev e Jacobsen and the engineers at Sarcos, a robotics

company he started in 1983 that was recently purchased by the def ense giant Ray theon. The f lame-throwing monster? That's The Army's Robot Sherpa the star of the superhero blockbuster Iron Man, due out May 2. The f ilm f ollows a prolif ic inv entor named Tony Stark who builds a robotic suit of armor that grants him f antastical abilities. Iron Man has been thriv ing in comics f or more than f our decades, but

1 of 10 10/30/2009 05:22 PM Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/build...

this is Holly wood's f irst go at the story . And the timing couldn't be better. Not only is Iron Man—a hero born of pure DARPA's Amazing Robot Pack engineering—the perf ect idol f or our gadget-obsessed era, but f or the f irst time since the character appeared, the suit is more Mule Keeps its Balance On Ice than just an illustrated dream.

In the past sev en y ears, a handf ul of engineers hav e taken the military 's 40-y ear-old f antasy of mechanically enhanced soldiers that can carry heav y loads and begun to make it real. Funded with millions f rom the Pentagon's Def ense Adv anced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), Jacobsen and others hav e f inally begun marry ing artif icial muscles and control sy stems Science, darpa, exoskeleton, exoskeletons, Gregory into suits that could soon be av ailable to soldiers, f iremen and the wheelchair-bound. There are still serious challenges—powering Mone, hollywood science, may 2008, military, these wearable robots, f or one—but Sarcos's XOS, the most capable f ull-body suit, one that mov es seamlessly with its wearer, Raytheon, raytheon sarcos xos, robotics, robots, has ev en the comic's creators f eeling like the real world is catching up to their v ision. Af ter Adi Granov , one of the main sarcos illustrators of the comic and a consultant to the f ilm, watched a clip of the suit in action, he was startled. "I knew that's where we were heading, but I didn't realize we were this close," Granov say s. Aside f rom the lack of f light and weapons, he adds, "that's Iron Man."

Check out video of the XOS in action here, and for a brief photo history of the man-made exoskeleton, see our gallery here. Continue reading this feature below.

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45 COMMENTS

04/09/08 at 4:26 pm sexy . link to this comment

04/09/08 at 5:49 pm I'd rather hav e a HAL-5. Do an image search f or it, it's pretty awesome. And it's been around f or y ears. link to this comment

04/09/08 at 11:00 pm =O wow Just out of curiosity , if y ou were lif ting weights in the suit, would that build y our muscle? If so, it could help people in rehabilitations to lif t like a bajillion pounds and gain there muscle back, or help me show of f to the ladies :) link to this comment

04/10/08 at 1:56 am Ewok:

It wouldnt matter if y ou could lif t a million pounds in the suit, y ou gain muscle on how much YOU lif t. So if the suit makes lif ting a million pounds equiv alent to lif ting 10 pounds... y ou might as well just lif t a 10 pound weight because its the same.

^_^ link to this comment

04/10/08 at 4:33 pm Hmm thats pretty cool. I can see why the military is pay ing out-the wazoo f or this thing. Personaly i think it should be used f or construction, to sav e on energy and only hav e to endanger 3 men instead of 50.

Also i dont like the idea of wasting it f ighting battles, it seems like kind of a waste if u ask me.

And the disabled thing is a really great idea if y ou can make it less noticeable, and or bulky .

-Word.of .Warcraf t link to this comment

04/11/08 at 6:42 pm I like the idea of an exo suit, but using hy drualics to mov e the limbs seems outdated f or something so adv anced. when will they come up with some ty pe of sy nthetic muscle that minipulates the human muscle better adn f aster. link to this comment

04/12/08 at 5:13 am I think idea is good and may be not a perf ect but still it islink a to this comment

2 of 10 10/30/2009 05:22 PM Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/build...

The Other Pow er Players The world of exoskeleton researchers is small, secretiv e and a little catty . Ev en when they aren't sure exactly how someone else's suit operates, the builders aren't af raid of lobbing keep-this-between-y ou-and-me digs at each other. The most common is some f orm of "Ask him how he's going to power it." The XOS and the two other leading exoskeletons in the U.S. hav e approached this critical question f rom opposite angles. Jacobsen decided to make an extremely capable suit f irst and f igure out later how to power it f or 4 to 24 hours, as Darpa mandated. During all the demos I watched, Jameson and the suit were tethered to a hy draulic pump that draws electricity f rom an external power supply . (The suit can operate f rom batteries, but only f or 40 minutes at a time.) But the country 's other two top exoskeleton designers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology prof essor Hugh Herr and Homay oon Kazerooni of the Univ ersity of Calif ornia at Berkeley , began with the power problem.

Herr is try ing to build a leg-powering machine that uses as little energy as possible—the f irst iteration draws a mere two watts, comparable to a portable radio—but can support 80 percent of an 80-pound load on a user's back. In its current design, because of the way it af f ects his gait, the wearer burns slightly more energy with the suit than if he were just walking with the load alone. But Herr thinks that within the near f uture, he can improv e the mechanics so that the machine actually sav es the wearer ef f ort. Ultimately , he env isions weekend warriors using exoskeletons as recreational tools, strapping in so they can run through the mountains all day . While Herr muses about these kinds of self -powered sy stems as a long-term dream, Kazerooni implies to me that he's already part of the way there.

Kazerooni, another v eteran of the Darpa program (neither he nor Herr has so f ar gotten additional money f rom the military bey ond the original grant), say s his Human Load Carrier (HULC) lower-body exoskeleton can operate f or more than 20 hours without recharging. He say s it allows the user to carry 100 pounds on his back and burn 15 percent less oxy gen than if he was supporting the added weight alone.

Kazerooni's dev ice wasn't ready f or a public unv eiling and, when pressed f or details, would say only that the sy stem is analogous to that of a hy brid car. Just as a hy brid uses the energy transf erred during braking to recharge its battery , HULC capitalizes on the f orce transf erred f rom the ground each time the user plants his weight on a dif f erent leg. The v ery act of walking keeps it juiced. He's now in the middle of a three-y ear, $2-million grant f rom the National Institute of Standards and Technology to modif y his sy stem so it can help people with mobility disorders. "This isn't just a war machine," he say s. "Our machine could replace the wheelchair."

The closest competitor to the XOS is also a medical dev ice, but on the other side of the Pacif ic, in Japan. Roboticist Yoshiy uki Sankai launched a company in 2004 called Cy berdy ne (the same name as the f irm that sparks the robot rev olution in the Terminator f ilms, incidentally ) to market his f ull-body exoskeleton, now known as the Hy brid Assistiv e Limb, or HAL-5. Rather than using f orce sensors like the XOS, sensors in HAL-5 attached to the wearer's skin pick up signals f rom his muscles to determine Pant Suit: Berkeley Bionics’s ExoHiker how he wants to mov e. The suit's control sy stem studies and then mimics a person's natural gait. This means it takes up to half lower-body exoskeleton charges itself through the an hour f or the suit and the operator to get in sy nc—y ou can't just snap in and go. But since Cy berdy ne sees the HAL-5 as both a act of walking using regenerative force, much like rehabilitation dev ice and nurse's assistant, the training period may not matter. Strapped into the battery -powered suit, a hospital a hybrid car does. Courtesy Berkeley Bionics worker could hoist heav y patients as if they were kids. Sankai is leasing the suit to customers now. Team Check out video of the XOS in action here, and for a brief photo history of the man-made exoskeleton, see our gallery here. Continue reading this feature below.

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45 COMMENTS

Shin 04/09/08 at 4:26 pm sexy . link to this comment

The Adama 04/09/08 at 5:49 pm I'd rather hav e a HAL-5. Do an image search f or it, it's linkpretty to this comment

1 of 10 10/30/2009 05:38 PM Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/build...

An Exoskeleton is Born In 2000, Sarcos applied f or a piece of the Darpa money , in part because Jacobsen believ ed he had a solution f or one of the biggest questions laid out in the original call f or proposals: how the operator would interf ace with the robot. To conf irm his hunch, Jacobsen asked the company 's staf f photographer, Jon Price, if his daughter would help with a little experiment.

The test called f or Price to be, in ef f ect, the exoskeleton, and his daughter to be the pilot. With her back to her f ather, she stepped up on his f eet, her toes atop his. Then they held hands f or balance and she began to walk. Price's job was to stay in step, to keep his f eet directly beneath hers. Within a f ew minutes, they were mov ing in sy nc. His daughter made all the high-lev el decisions—how f ast to walk, when to turn—and Price just tried to mimic her, step f or step.

The demonstration prov ed f or Jacobsen that, giv en a f ew points of contact—the f eet and hands, in this case—a smart machine could interpret the intended mov ements of the person strapped into it and react accordingly . On the way to the f inished XOS, Jacobsen and his group designed compact actuators, built improv ed f orce sensors, inv ented more-ef f icient hy draulic v alv es, and ev en machined the robot's aluminum f eet. But what Jacobsen calls his "get out of the way " control scheme is the big idea that brings it all together, the approach that transf ormed it f rom just another of his cool robots into a superhero suit. Obusek, who has personally tried the XOS, agrees. "A human will f atigue f airly quickly ev en with v ery little resistance," he say s, but the XOS's control sy stem reduces that drag to nothing.

It's that control that enables demo pilot Jameson to cruise through a workout without raising his heart rate. The instant he starts to pull down that weighted bar, sensors in each of his hand-grips register changes in torque. Without the exoskeleton's help, the sensors would show that he was try ing to pull down about 100 pounds in each hand. But the goal of the sy stem, Jacobsen explains, is to get the f orce on those sensors as close to zero as possible; to let the XOS do the work. "The XOS carries itself ," he say s, "and [Jameson] carries himself ."

Those hand-grip sensors, along with similar ones in the suit's f eet and back, f eed measurements to a central processor hundreds Rear View: The box on the suit's back carries the and, f or some of the sensors, sev eral thousand times per second. The sy stem runs these readings through a set of equations computer and control systems. John B. Carnett that gov erns the position and motion of the suit's arms, legs and back. It recognizes that Jameson wants to bring his hands down and calculates what each artif icial muscle in each of the joints needs to do to make the suit mirror him. Jameson nev er f eels strain because the sy stem instructs the robotic arms to grab the weight bef ore he exerts any signif icant f orce. When he steps out of the XOS af ter a round on the weight machine, he's not ev en out of breath. I ask him how he f eels. "Fine," he say s, shrugging.

The suit Jameson has been using is roughly v ersion 4.0. Jacobsen shows me a room where the f irst three models hang like mannequins. It reminds me so much of Iron Man's "Hall of Armor," where Stark keeps his suits, that I'm tempted to check the crime blotter in the area, see if there hav e been any instances of v igilante justice by a half -man, half -robot.

The f irst suit, built in 2002, didn't ev en hav e power. The Sarcos team constructed it to prov e that the exoskeleton would be able to mov e like we do. Jacobsen had one of the engineers strap in and try things like kicking a soccer ball, running, climbing into the tight cab of a bulldozer. This helped them determine that they had the right range of motion and the joints in the right places.

Getting those joints to open and close with the proper speed and power prov ed trickier. In 2003, Sarcos began working on hy draulically driv en actuators to f unction as mechanical muscles. This approach isn't rev olutionary . In f act, say s another exoskeleton builder, the suit's reliance on hy draulics will be its downf all. One engineer, who declined to be named because he hadn't seen the suit in person (its only public display is in a v ideo shot by a local TV news crew that got uploaded to Video: The XOS Exoskeleton in YouTube), said that a purely hy draulic sy stem would waste too much power maintaining f luid pressure in the v alv es. Electric Action actuators could be better, he suggested, because the energy they use would be proportional to the action. But Jacobsen testily dismisses this critique. "Do y ou like the brakes on y our car? Do y ou like the landing gear on a plane to work? Those are both The Army's Robot Sherpa hy draulic," he say s. Then he explains that he's gotten around the energy -draw problem. Although he's characteristically cagey about the details, he say s Sarcos redesigned the v alv es that control the f low of the f luid to be more of an on-demand sy stem, so they consume power only when the suit mov es. DARPA's Amazing Robot Pack Despite its prowess in the weight room, the XOS hasn't hit all the goals of the Darpa program. It won't let y ou dunk a basketball Mule Keeps its Balance On Ice or run any f aster, and it won't turn y ou into a Hercules. But one of the objectiv es of Darpa's rigorous list of demands, Obusek say s, was simply to see whether any of them would be possible. Of the three teams that took part in the project (Sarcos, Oak Ridge National Laboratory , and the Univ ersity of Calif ornia at Berkeley ), the XOS emerged in 2005 as the suit closest to the agency 's initial v ision. As a result, it is the only f ull exoskeleton the military has mov ed into the next dev elopment stage; Science, darpa, exoskeleton, exoskeletons, Gregory Sarcos is now working under a two-y ear, $10-million Army grant. Mone, hollywood science, may 2008, military, Raytheon, raytheon sarcos xos, robotics, robots, Jameson steps back in f or a f inal, relaxing workout, and as I watch this 150-pound robot mirroring his ev ery mov e by way of sarcos just six points of contact, and consider the amount of data f lowing around the suit ev ery second to keep those actuators mov ing quietly and seamlessly , the whole scene seems as f antastic as the mov ie's Iron Man. I half expect Jameson to blast of f through the roof . But that's not going to happen. For the XOS to bust out of this cav e, they 're going to hav e to cut the power cord.

1 of 10 10/30/2009 05:37 PM Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/build...

Meet the Robot Maker Stev e Jacobsen's résumé makes him seem like the Willy Wonka of robotics—his projects ov er the past 35 y ears hav e spanned an 80-ton mechanized dinosaur and the Bellagio casino's f ountains. But he looks more prof essor than madman, tall with a board- straight back and perf ectly groomed gray -white hair. Bef ore introducing the XOS, he leads me on a tour of what he only half -jokingly calls his "tunnel of terror." It could pass f or a dentist's of f ice f rom the outside, but the cav ernous space is the headquarters of the company he f ounded as an R&D arm of the Univ ersity of Utah's college of engineering, where he taught at the time. Although he's built robots f or some notoriously tough customers—he hints that Disney is just as demanding as the military —he's still an academic at heart. He ref ers to his brain as a f riend he likes to go of f and spend time with, and he seems to care more about solv ing hard problems than about the solution's ultimate application. Af ter skipping right past a Ping-Pong-play ing humanoid 'bot, he lingers in f ront of a pair of singing, mechanical toucans he built f or a local restaurant, marv eling at how dif f icult it was to make them mov e like real birds. "We just do things we want to do because they 're interesting," he say s.

He talks in f iv e-minute-long bursts on topics that range f rom expressions of wonder at the energy ef f iciency of biological sy stems ("Humans run on carrots!") to ref lections on engineering to starry -ey ed platitudes ("Some things hav e to be believ ed to be seen"). But his chattiness belies a penchant f or secrecy . He rarely talks to the press. He won't tell me his age. As we walk though v arious labs, he'll point to a dev ice—a miniature unmanned ground v ehicle, a new design f or an exoskeleton leg—launch into an excited explantion, and then stop and ask me not to mention it. His reticence stems in part f rom the f act that sev eral of his projects are military -f unded. But there's also a hint of the magician who's not keen to rev eal too many of his tricks. Beyond: Raytheon Sarcos XOS: The most The mix of Sarcos's projects, which also include prosthetics and nanoscale motors, seems random. But Ephrahim Garcia say s this advanced real-world exoskeleton yet, the XOS, v ersatility is part of what made Jacobsen uniquely suited to the exoskeleton challenge. He had prov en skills in sof tware and grants its wearer extraordinary strength and mechanical engineering, but he also had the unique ability to simply inv ent what he needed. "He can design the actuators. He can endurance. To read more about the development design the control sy stem. He can design the machine and its components," Garcia say s. That kind of range was absolutely of the XOS, read our feature article here. John B. Carnett required.

How to Lift 200 Pounds Like It W as 2: The XOS works similar to a human appendage. When we perform a bicep curl, the muscle fibers in our upper arm contract, pulling on tendons that lift our forearm. In the XOS, a sensor in the handle detects a force as the operator moves his arm. The sensor’s data goes to the computer, which calculates how to move the exoskeleton to minimize the strain on the user’s hand. These instructions go to a series of valves that control the flow of high-pressure hydraulic fluid to cylinder actuators in the joints. The fluid moves the cylinders, which move the cables attached to them, acting as tendons and pulling on the robotic limbs. The XOS has 30 actuators, each controlling a different joint. Kevin Hand

"When y ou build something like an exoskeleton," Jacobsen say s, "there are about 25 subsy stems, and they all hav e to work bef ore y ou can go on to the next step. The two main objectiv es are strength and endurance, but it's got to do 75 dif f erent things well." Of all his robots, the XOS, because of the host of problems it presented, is clearly his f av orite son. "None of them had a target like this. None of them had to hav e a self -contained sy stem that has such strength, speed, endurance, f lexibility ." Check out video of the XOS in action here, and for a brief photo history of the man-made exoskeleton, see our gallery here. Continue reading this feature below.

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From Marvel to Machine If y ou want to untangle the technological roots of the f antasy against which any real exoskeleton will be compared, y ou need to v isit the place where the comic ev olv ed: the Midtown Manhattan headquarters of Marv el, Inc. There, Tom Brev oort, the editor who ov ersees the Iron Man comics, giv es me a short biographical summary of Tony Stark: MIT grad, superstar scientist and engineer, heir to a f ortune, womanizing alcoholic. The story of how he becomes Iron Man has changed ov er the y ears, but the basic idea, and the one the mov ie has adopted, is that some bad guy s take him hostage and demand that he build them a killer weapon. He constructs a suit of armor instead and, af ter escaping, resolv es to improv e both the suit and himself , transf orming f rom an immature brainiac into a true superhero.

Look, One Hand: Because a wearer of the XOS feels almost no strain, he could hold these 16-pound bowling balls for hours on end John B. Carnett

Iron Man can outrace a jet, dead-lif t 1,000 tons, hack into high-security computers, and do it all through a direct brain interf ace. Far-f etched? Sure, but Brev oort say s that's the point. "Iron Man's alway s got to be three steps ahead of the best things y ou'v e got, or he's a f ossil."

When the character appeared in 1963, the best the military had was a concept on paper. That y ear, U.S. Army researcher Serge Zaroodny published a report describing his design f or a wearable robot that would endow the operator with Hulk-like power, but the necessary technology didn't exist to make it v iable. Besides a f ew non-military designs [see timeline photo gallery here], the prospect of an actual super-suit languished until 2000, when Darpa began a sev en-y ear, $75-million program called Exoskeletons f or Human Perf ormance Augmentation. By that time, a handf ul of exoskeleton champions—such as f ormer Army colonel Jack Obusek, the director of human sy stems integration at the Natick Soldier Research, Dev elopment and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts—believ ed that the technology had begun to catch up. Obusek, who has helped push f or the military 's exoskeleton research since 1995, say s the rise of smaller, more v ersatile sensors and f aster microprocessors began to conv ince him and other of f icials that a wearable robot just might be buildable.

But Darpa's ambitious wish list read like something f rom a comic: a machine that would let the av erage soldier lug hundreds of pounds and hike f or day s without f atigue, handle weapons that normally require two people, and whisk the injured of f the battlef ield by tossing one or two men on his back. They asked f or the suit to support more armor, rendering men imperv ious to enemy f ire. They ev en wanted it to make soldiers jump higher. They wanted Iron Man.

Some of the experts Darpa consulted bef ore launching the program didn't agree that this v ision was realistic. "Half the people I talked to believ ed, almost as if it was a religious thing, and about half thought it was a complete waste of money , time and resources," say s Cornell Univ ersity engineer Ephrahim Garcia, who led the Darpa program in its inf ancy . The nay say ers were hardly crazy , he adds: "It was a huge challenge." The exoskeleton would need a portable power sy stem that could keep it running f or up to a f ull day ; small, powerf ul artif icial muscles; and a complex control sy stem that gov erned their actions. And it would need to be fast.

The exoskeleton would hav e to be the soldier's mechanical shadow, reading his ev ery motion—the lef t arm is swinging in this direction with this much f orce—and mimicking him almost instantly . Ev en the slightest lag would create a drag-like ef f ect and make the operator f eel as if he were mov ing through water. The machine would also need some way of reading f orces applied across the suit thousands of times per second, plus microprocessors powerf ul enough to turn all that data into immediate directions f or the robot's limbs, so they could keep pace with the person inside.

Solv ing these problems, and f iguring out how to combine the sy stems into a machine with the requisite speed, agility , strength and endurance, called f or a real-world Tony Stark. But that turned out not to be a hotshot weapons designer. It was a guy who was building robot dinosaurs.

Check out video of the XOS in action here, and for a brief photo history of the man-made exoskeleton, see our gallery here. Continue reading this feature

1 of 10 10/30/2009 05:29 PM Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/build...

Breaking Free In a recent Iron Man comic, the hero is ly ing beaten on the f loor of his enemy 's lair, and the head-up display in his armored helmet f eeds him the bad news—he's almost out of power. But there's still hope. He jams a f inger through the concrete f loor into a power line and quickly recharges his suit.

Unf ortunately , real-world exoskeletons take more than a stolen jolt to power up, so the f irst XOS in the f ield may ev en be tethered. Obusek env isions this early v ersion to be more of a workhorse than a warrior. A plugged-in suit, borrowing energy f rom a v ehicle or a ship's generator, could help a soldier rapidly unload a helicopter stacked with heav y equipment or repair tanks with broken tracks. Although the Army hopes to begin f ield-testing this v ersion of the XOS by 2009, Jacobsen and company are still working toward an entirely self -powered v ersion.

This summer, the company will launch a research program with an engine-design f irm to dev elop a generator capable of powering the XOS f or hours at a time. Jacobsen won't tell me any more than that, but not just because he's being coy . He'd rather talk about a more interesting challenge than building a robust power supply : cutting the suit's appetite.

W hat a Kick: Sarcos’s senior electrical engineer, Todd Johnson, demonstrates a next-gen leg, which can swing freely, just like a real leg does, so it uses less power. John B. Carnett

Jacobsen shows me a new, energy -sav ing leg that's modeled on human propulsion. When we walk, we generate most of the power f rom the hip when we push of f . Then, as the leg swings f orward, the small muscles in our knees and elsewhere rest bef ore making sure our f eet hit the ground at the desired spot. That f ree-swinging technique sav es energy . Kazerooni and Herr hav e already incorporated it into their legged exoskeletons, and Jacobsen is building it into the f uture v ersion of his XOS. "The next step," he

1 of 11 10/30/2009 05:38 PM Building the Real Iron Man | Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/build...

say s, looking ahead a f ew y ears, "is to get the power down to the point where we can walk using about one to three horsepower"—little enough to run on a portable power pack.

Jacobsen sees today 's v ersion as a base v ehicle that will ev entually be modif ied to f it specif ic tasks, whether in health care, emergency response, maintenance or war. Future models could ev en operate autonomously . "You could get out and tell it, 'Why don't y ou go in that building, because I don't want to,'" he say s.

Later, walking through the Ray theon Sarcos lobby , I spot a f ew animated incarnations of this long-range v ision rolling on a f lat-screen TV. In the clips, armored soldiers throw heav y missiles on their shoulders, hurdle high walls, speed through combat rolls, ev en execute gracef ul backf lips. Though encased in an XOS, they look as nimble as NFL cornerbacks. They look like Iron Man.

Contributing editor Gregory Mone has been reading Iron Man comics since he was 10 years old. Check out video of the XOS in action here, and for a brief photo history of the man-made exoskeleton, see our gallery here. Page 6 of 6 « first ‹ previous 1 2 3 4 5 6

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2 of 11 10/30/2009 05:38 PM