Exoskeletons for the Battlefield

If you happened to watch Sigourney Weaver in the Alien film series, then you’d know about exoskeletons. In one installment of the series, she uses a robot suit used to load and offload cargo from spacecraft to beat the heck out of the alien predator she was trying to kill. That machine is now reality thanks to the efforts of a software engineer who has developed an exoskeleton that has the capacity to increase a normal person’s strength as much as 20 times. What does that mean for us normal people, well say in the construction industry, you could have one or two of these to handle heavy loads and helping the other guy’s position heavy members of the structures they are building. On the battlefield, suit up a soldier and surround him with enough protective armor that would allow him to go against a tank (with armament of course). He could also repair tanks and other heavy machinery on site without fear of exposing himself to enemy fire, allowing easy servicing of military hardware.
Developed for rescue work, imagine the combination of a human’s mind and the power of a bulldozer clamoring up to rescue survivors form disasters like the ones that the Chinese have experienced. The concepts and implications go on and on for augmentation systems is better than totally independent machines doing a man’s job (or a woman’s in Sigourney’s case). The development was spearheaded by the US Army in hopes of developing exoskeletons for their future soldiers. The current developers are still in the research phase for there is still no battery that can power up the machine for more than a couple of minutes. Other obstacles are costs which should go down as more materials are discovered to be as light as fabric yet stronger than steel in tensile strength. There may be more to this technology than what it has become so don’t be surprised to see one of these machines working at a construction site near you sometime soon.

Posted by Nick at 4:29 pm under General