Iron Man-like Exoskeleton Nears Production

fangmcgee writes "By now, with films like Iron Man, its sequel, and Avatar, Hollywood has made us thoroughly familiar with the idea of the robotic exoskeleton. Less well known, however, is that researchers are actually building robotic exoskeletons like the ones envisioned by Hollywood and the comic book visionaries from whom Hollywood pilfers its most lucrative ideas. Among the developers of real-life Iron Man suits (of which there are many, the world over) is a group called Raytheon Sarcos. And as IEEE Spectrum reports in this month's issue, its impressive second-generation exoskeleton robotics suit, dubbed the XOS 2, is nearing production."

Not Skynet enough

[Toe, The]

Seems like a major purpose of these is to have soldiers wear an exoskeleton to make them more formidable both offensively and defensively.

But can't you just skip the middleman (literally) and just have good ol' fashion killbots?

I mean, what's the point of having actual people involved in a process so minor as, well, killing people?

Re:Not Skynet enough

[CommieLib]

I don't think that's going to be the (direct) purpose of these...not for moral or ethical considerations, but a simple engineering one - there's no way the power is going to last long enough for a patrol.

These would be absolutely terrific for combat loading [wikipedia.org], though, and don't underestimate how important that is. Imagine an aircraft comes in for resupply, a cohort of engineers in these suits...you could reload and refuel MUCH faster. The force efficacy of an asset is a function of that time.

So you optimize the suit to work for maybe forty five minutes, and then have hot swappable batteries.

Re:Not Skynet enough

[TheRaven64]

For the same reason drones have not replaced the manned air force. There is often a lot of EM noise on a battefield, and some of it is quite intentional. You therefore need your soldiers - human or robotic - to be autonomous. Real combat isn't like Red Alert. The general is not clicking on individual soldiers and telling them where to walk, he's telling a captain to secure a specific objective, that captain is giving orders to squads, and NCOs are making the realtime tactical decisions. Programming that level of autonomy into a robot is really hard. It needs to be able to understand high-level objectives, like secure an area, protect civilians in another, and so on. For now, at least, it's a lot easier to put a human on the ground. Putting fewer humans on the ground is a good idea though, because people back home complain if they don't come back.