Biomechatronic Man

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Biomechatronic Man table of contents By Lance Ulanoff Top Ten Tech Trends July 13, 2004 • Biomechatronic Man Total posts: 3 • Wireless USB • WiMAX: The Wireless Net Gets Extreme • The Service-Oriented Nation The 1970s television shows The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic • Get Out the Mote Woman hold nearly equal positions in the pantheon of pop culture, but their • Self-Writing Software premises have been little more than pipe dreams. That pipe is blowing more • High-Definition DVD than smoke these days, as scientists across the country work on human • Scaling the Language augmentation robotics technology, also knows as biomechatronics—in other Barrier words, the merging of body and machine. • VoIP: Getting Better All the Time • Smart Skin Following in the footsteps of household robots like the iRobot Roomba and the Sony AIBO entertainment robots, as well as battlefield robots like the iRobot Packbot, robots are now starting to show up on the human body. At news MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, assistant professor Hugh Robocar Showdown in the Herr and his biomechatronics team have spent the past five years Desert developing the Active Ankle-Foot Orthosis (AAFO). Made of plastics, a Robots Take Center Stage motor, a microprocessor, and a power supply, this robot can reanimate a paralyzed ankle. Racy Robots Lilliputian Levitation Unlike a prosthesis, an orthosis doesn't replace Sony's Humanoid Robot missing limbs. Instead, it attaches to a paralyzed Learns How to Jog limb and may eventually enhance healthy ones. The View All > 3-pound AAFO covers the leg from below the knee to the toes and restores natural motion. opinions Robotics Revolution Across the country, a team at the University of Roomba Returns California, Berkeley, Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory is working on the Berkeley The World's Best Robot (Humor) Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (BLEEX), which fits over the wearer's legs and assists in carrying heavy loads over long distances. It uses sensors, The Optimist's Dilemma actuators, a network, and complex algorithms to compute the exoskeleton's World, Meet Roomba motion. It's designed to imitate the torque, speed, and motion of a 165- View All > pound person walking.

Homayoon Kazerooni, a Berkeley professor who invented the concept in the early 1990s, says that the prototype can support about 80 pounds in a special backpack. "You simply walk, and it walks with you," he says. The Click here to download Free IDC device, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Whitepaper (DARPA), has applications in defense, firefighting, and rescue and recovery operations.

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Protect Your Network Both devices are several years away from commercial use, and the AAFO from Corporate E-mail will be costly to deploy. But as MIT's Herr sees it, human performance Threats augmentation is the shape of the future: Ensure Mission- Critical Backups Are "In the coming decade we will see body amplifiers that expand human Complete endurance and strength. We will see novel transportation devices that do not rely on wheels, where our own limbs are augmented, where we can traverse All White Papers > very rough terrains with a very high metabolic economy or efficiency. I predict that people for certain situations will not want to use wheels anymore, because their legs, augmented by technology, far outperform wheeled Partner Services: vehicles." ● ONLINE Dell Business Systems CLASSIFIEDS Maybe Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner were born just a little early. Dell Home Systems MPC (MicronPC) ● Get $50 or $75 < Get a $50 HP mail-in rebate when you buy any digital Visual Studio & .Net Developer Center IT Reseller News & Resources camera and HP photo printer, or get a $75 HP mail-in rebate when you buy ... ● Intuit Track-It!

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