Aliens-Style Exoskeleton May Enable 10x Human Lift

Good stuff:

An exoskeleton that can be worn by a human is a new type of robot under development at Tsukuba University. It's called Hybrid Assistive Limb, HAL for short, and anyone who wears it has potential to lift up to 10-times the weight they normally could.

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HAL works by figuring out what the wearer's muscle are doing. The suit then simply reacts.

“The command signals from the brain are transmitted to the muscles through the motor neurons, and we can detect such faint bio-electrical signals on the surface of the skin, and these signals are calibrated into the computer here, and after that this computer controls these power units so he can move or upgrade his power,� says Sankai.

And believe it or not, sometimes the suit interprets those electrical signals more quickly than the wearer's muscles. In other words, it moves before the human muscle does.

Thanks to Get Away From Her You Amish!

posted by Ace at 10:28 PM

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