Robotic Suit Gives Shipyard Workers Super Strength 125
An anonymous reader writes Ship-builders Daewoo have been testing robotic exoskeletons in South Korean shipyards that provide the wearer with super-human strength. From the article: "The exoskeleton fits anyone between 160 and 185 centimetres tall. Workers do not feel the weight of its 28-kilogram frame of carbon, aluminium alloy and steel, as the suit supports itself and is engineered to follow the wearer's movements. With a 3-hour battery life, the exoskeleton allows users to walk at a normal pace and, in its prototype form, it can lift objects with a mass of up to 30 kilograms."
Re:Only geeks... (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to work in a freight terminal - we would load 2 or 3 trucks with 20-30 Kg packages over a 2 hour period.. and none of us were 'buff' by any stretch of the imagination
That's great! With this thing, however, you reduce staff loads. One trained worker could do an 8 hour shift, without stress and with (possibly) lower risk of injury, just by switching out batteries every few hour. Beats having to properly train four men to do the work and losing workers to strain injuries. If this is cost effective, who knows. Also, this is the prototype. I would assume they are interested in higher powered systems for the production system.
So what I'm curious to see is how people handle moving with heavy weights, without feeling the heavy weights. Spinning around could be potentially dangerous, and dropping items could be devastating if someone were to forget the true weight of the item they held.