Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Ekso Bionics: Building Stronger Humans”.
I’M rafe needleman the editor-in-chief of make and we are at exobionics in richmond california. This company makes exo skeletons. The company makes devices for medical rehab for people who are learning to walk again, and it also makes industrial devices like the one i’m wearing here this. Let me lift and maneuver a really heavy angle. Grinder like it was just floating in space in front of me. This industrial exoskeleton takes no power.
It’S all mechanics you step into. It strap yourself in attach the floating tool arm in this case and you’re able to maneuver a really heavy device around like it weighs almost nothing. The product i’m told, is easy to wear once you’re used to it.
I found it a little bit awkward, but then i have never worn an exoskeleton before the one thing i will say, though, is that this device literally weighed nothing in my hands. It was heavy and had a lot of inertia, but i could push it around like it was on gliders. I talked to the ceo nathan harding about the challenges that exo has faced in designing these amazing exoskeletons. If you’re going to augment a person’s strength, endurance and mobility, essentially what you’re going to do is you’re going to take a robot and you’re going to wrap it around a person and that’s, what’s called a human exoskeleton right and we see human exoskeletons as this big Industry that has all these different markets that it can play in uh, military, medical, now, industrial and eventually it’ll even be a consumer item.
I think what really happened is the it revolution allowed us to make portable systems that could have a very rich interface between man and machine right and that you could iterate that or interface a bunch and then so people really started thinking. Hey exoskeletons could work now and we started building all these exoskeletons and by doing that we got experience, and then you know what we found things that could have been done a long time ago. Well like, for instance, our you know, our industrial exoskeleton that’ll enter the construction market next year. It has no batteries, no computer uh, no actuation at all, but you know the path to getting.
There took all kinds of computers and batteries and and and work on that when you build an exoskeleton, it still has to follow the constraints of nature like, for instance, its center of mass still has to be above the footprint of your feet, and so some people, Don’T really realize that if they put a super heavy exoskeleton, that kind of hangs behind them that they’re going to have to adjust their stance to still balance, that’s that’s one that can catch people uh when they’re trying to make their own you. The most important thing is that you don’t know what the human’s going to do until you try something humans respond in amazing ways. They can learn to adapt to something very quickly and by the second time they use it, they’ll be doing something completely different than they started out with. For that reason, this is a this is an area where you have to do experimentation and you have to just build and test and try things all the time. So that’s really the philosophy that we follow, because if you know you spend years building this thing that you’re convinced is going to help someone climb a mountain and you’re not trying things along the way you might find out that it just does not work for a Person once you really put it on them, um and and if you just keep iterating and trying things you’ll find some things that work worse than you thought and something that worked a lot better than you thought, and you can progress that way. If you liked this video subscribe to our website or send us a comment on facebook or twitter be sure to check out our other project videos or visit us on makezine.com, you .