MARVEL TO MACHINE
If you want to untangle the technological roots of the fantasy against which any real exoskeleton will be compared, you need to visit the place where the comic evolved: the Midtown Manhattan headquarters of Marvel, Inc. There, Tom Brevoort, the editor who oversees the Iron Man comics, gives me a short biographical summary of Tony Stark: MIT grad, superstar scientist and engineer, heir to a fortune, womanizing alcoholic. The story of how he becomes Iron Man has changed over the years, but the basic idea, and the one the movie has adopted, is that some bad guys take him hostage and demand that he build them a killer weapon. He constructs a suit of armor instead and, after escaping, resolves to improve both the suit and himself, transforming from an immature brainiac into a true superhero
Iron Man can outrace a jet, dead-lift 1,000 tons, hack into high-security computers, and do it all through a direct brain interfaceWhen the character appeared in 1963, the best the military had was a concept on paper. That year, United States Army researcher Serge Zaroodny published a report describing his design for a wearable robot that would endow the operator with Hulk-like power, but the necessary technology didn’t exist to make it viable. Besides a few non-military designs [see timeline photo gallery here], the prospect of an actual super-suit languished until 2000, when Darpa began a seven-year, $75-million program called Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation. By that time, a handful of exoskeleton champions—such as former Army colonel Jack Obusek, the director of human systems integration at the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts—believed that the technology had begun to catch up. Obusek, who has helped push for the military’s exoskeleton research since 1995, says the rise of smaller, more versatile sensors and faster microprocessors began to convince him and other officials that a wearable robot just might be build
ROBOT MAKER
Steve Jacobsen’s résumé makes him seem like the Willy Wonka of robotics—his projects over the past 35 years have spanned an 80-ton mechanized dinosaur and the Bellagio casino’s fountains. But he looks more professor than madman, tall with a board-straight back and perfectly groomed gray-white hair. Before introducing the XOS, he leads me on a tour of what he only half-jokingly calls his “tunnel of terror.” It could pass for a dentist’s office from the outside, but the cavernous space is the headquarters of the company he founded as an R&D arm of the University of Utah’s college of engineering, where he taught at the time. Although he’s built robots for some notoriously tough customers—he hints that Disney is just as demanding as the military—he’s still an academic at heart. He refers to his brain as a friend he likes to go off and spend time with, and he seems to care more about solving hard problems than about the solution’s ultimate application. After skipping right past a Ping-Pong-playing humanoid ‘bot, he lingers in front of a pair of singing, mechanical toucans he built for a local restaurant, marveling at how difficult it was to make them move like real birds. “We just do things we want to do because they’re interesting,” he says.
He talks in five-minute-long bursts on topics that range from expressions of wonder at the energy efficiency of biological systems (“Humans run on carrots!”) to reflections on engineering to starry-eyed platitudes (“Some things have to be believed to be seen”). But his chattiness belies a penchant for secrecy. He rarely talks to the press. He won’t tell me his age. As we walk though various labs, he’ll point to a device—a miniature unmanned ground vehicle, a new design for an exoskeleton leg—launch into an excited explantion, and then stop and ask me not to mention it. His reticence stems in part from the fact that several of his projects are military-funded. But there’s also a hint of the magician who’s not keen to reveal too many of his tricks
The mix of Sarcos’s projects, which also include prosthetics and nanoscale motors, seems random. But Ephrahim Garcia says this versatility is part of what made Jacobsen uniquely suited to the exoskeleton challenge. He had proven skills in software and mechanical engineering, but he also had the unique ability to simply invent what he needed. “He can design the actuators. He can design the control system. He can design the machine and its components,” Garcia says
You must be logged in to post a comment.