In what has to be a rare case of the ads here getting things right, this page for the BEAR robot was linked in the Google ads.
You are so obviously more intelligent than I, and so well informed, that I wonder why I bother to post. 
Heh. The Sarcos arm I encountered 15 years ago definitely had the potential to cause major damage to the user. They welded in hard mechanical stops to make sure it wouldn’t break your elbow or shoulder if there was a software malfunction. And you weren’t allowed to use it without wearing a crash helmet and keeping your foot on a floor-mounted dead man’s switch. Still, it was a very cool piece of technology even then.
So how much of this can be ascribed to logical progression of technology, and how much to Science Fiction directly inspiring science?
IIRC, the first use of airplanes in combat, the 1914 Punitive Expedition into Mexico, was rather lackluster. The planes suffered from limited range and severe reliability problems due to the desert conditions in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern US. There’s also a funny story about a US Army Wright Flyer crash landing in the middle of a cavalry training exercise because the engine cut out, and the cav officer, one Captain Douglas MacArthur, being angry enough to damn near go after the pilot with his saber. 
Of course, the technology improved rather quickly.
Same can be said for tanks, if I recall rightly. The British Mark I tank, while able to effortlessly cross trenches and barbed wire with ease, required constant maintenance while on the battlefield, (IIRC, several crew members had the important job of constantly lubing the internals of the vehicle) and the not-too-rare mechanical failures would of course leave your brave tank crew stranded in no-man’s land. Probably better off than the crew of one of the planes if THEIR engine broke down, of course.
And in terms of relative material value, I’d say the Hunley succeeded in giving more than she got, although of course the loss of her crews isn’t anything to cheer about, not to mention that she had no effect on the strategic outcome of the campaign or war.
Who the hell is talking about putting that suit on a battlefield? It’s obviously a prototype, and a damned impressive one at that, but I think we’re all perfectly aware that it’s a prototype, not the final product.
Correct me if I’m wrong, here, me being very much the civilian, but isn’t a soldier on the battlefield already a target himself? And don’t soldiers tend not to react terribly well to being struck by bullets and shrapnel even when they’re not wearing motorized exoskeletons? The obvious caveats about the amount of research and development needed before what we saw in that video is ready for battlefield deployment aside, I think I’d much rather take my combat chances in inside the Mobile Infantry Powersuit than outside it.
Didja miss where the OP said
Sounds to me like he’s expecting these things to be widespread in no time. Ain’t gonna happen. As for impressive, I can point you to any number of prototypes of things that looked impressive when they were developed, but never made it beyond the prototype stage for one reason or another. This thing’s an “Alpha” model at best. Note that they’re vague about how long this thing will be able to run on internal power. We don’t even know what it’s going to run on. Those are the important details. If the soldier using the thing only has half an hour of power and sounds like a lawnmower while it’s running, that’s going to severely limit it’s use. Can’t very well sneak up on the enemy that way, can you?
This isn’t a Powersuit by any means. Maybe the Powersuit’s great-great-great-great-great grandpappy. One of the things people have been talking about using these exoskeletons for is to enable a soldier to carry heavy loads into combat, no extra armor, no extra protection (other than what the frame of the exoskeleton would provide, of course). Nice idea, as a soldier’s kit is pretty heavy these days, but soldiers tend to find themselves in rather nasty places with dust, shrapnel and other things that can and do, quite frequently, jam their gear up and rendering it useless. If a soldier’s gun jams because of crud, he can throw it down and run away. If a soldier’s exoskeleton jams because of crud, he’s a big immobile target until he can get himself out of the exoskeleton.
I think the most telling point that it’s just an Alpha model is that–as anyone knows–real powersuit fighters are form fitting and piloted by hot babes.
That could be an idea for another sequel. The Resistance manages to erase Skynet from the timeline, preventing the Judgement Day in T3 and maybe even most of the events in T1 and T2 from happening. But somehow (this is the part I haven’t figured out yet), the Terminator movie series is made, and it inspires some young engineers to develop exoskeletons and fighting robots. They even name their company Cyberdyne, after the movies. Eventually the machines rebel, and Judgement Day comes much like it did in the movies, completing the loop.
Where’s my 100 million dollars?
Problem is: Skynet’s up and running! :eek:
Here’s UC Berkley’s site on their version of the exoskeleton. It’s a gas powered model and they claimed in 2004 it’d be going into production in “a few years.”
Oh HELL no. I didn’t mean that at all. True, I meant one without a tether pretty soon, but by no means practical.
Tuckerfan, this is a DARPA project. DARPA’s mission is to investigate “blue sky” projects. They fund some cool shit for the sake of it being cool, and the fact that just maybe… just maybe… it might have uses later. Their batting average is pretty low, there have been a lot of dead in DARPA projects, but when they find a good one that nobody else can do, it can change the world. Ever hear of the ARPANET? The internet might have never come to be (or at least delayed a couple of decades) if DARPA didn’t develop packet switching standards back in the 60’s.
Is getting these punch card eating hunks of transistors talking to each other practical? Not now, but it might be later. Besides, it’s cool.
Besides, you’d like 'em. I know you’re a machinist, so check this DARPA project out
Sounds fun don’t it? 'Scuse me while I step out to the garage. 
You mean, the part where he says a prototype is going to be tested next year?
Yeah, I know you can. You’ve started enough threads on them. Which is why your attitude in this thread is so weird, because this thing is a lot further along than a lot of the stuff that you’ve excitedly posted about in the past. I mean, weren’t you the guy who was so fired up about a space elevator a while back? Where’s the prototype for that? Sure, there’s a lot of hurdles to clear between now and any sort of final product, and there’s a good chance that it won’t be able to clear all of them. It’s still a cool idea with a lot of potential.
On the battlefield, yes. Even if it never works out as a military design, with the limitations you noted I can still think of plenty of non-military uses for such an invention.
Allow me to repeat myself: “The obvious caveats about the amount of research and development needed before what we saw in that video is ready for battlefield deployment aside…”
For the umpty-umpteenth time, everyone in this knows that the thing in that video is a very early design. No one is expecting that guy to walk out of the video and into Baghdad. But it’s a cool idea that could lead to a revolution in combat tactics, eventually.
Sure. And if a tank breaks down, it’s crew is a big immobile target until they can open up the hatch and get out. And if a plane breaks down, it’s an impromptu kinetic bomb. And if a submarine breaks down, it’s government subsidized housing for fish. That doesn’t mean that tanks, planes, and subs are useless as military hardware.
Actually, with my medical troubles, I’ll take a free one right now , tether and all.
When I was in the Army, (so long ago that I almost had to wear brown boots) there was no such thing as too much ammo. This device is just like ammo.
You all forget that the grunts (when out of sight of ossifers and newswhores) will find the best use for any sort of gear.
Every good ossifer knows when to turn his back so he has plausible deniability for letting the grunts ‘get it done.’
“Field tested” is what the OP said. Don’t forget that the title of the thread includes “It’s Real!” with all the “gee wilikers and golly” enthusiasm of the 1950s.
What makes the space elevator announcements so more interesting to me is that folks haven’t been putting serious money into it until relatively recently. Exoskeletons in one form or another have been around for a long time and not much has come of them. (Elvis uses one in one of his movies.) The technological outgrowth from even an unsuccessful attempt at building a space elevator will be massive. The exoskeleton? Not so much.
So can I. Most of them involve amputees and parapalegics. When Dean Kamen rolls one out, I’ll get excited (the Segway is simply Kamen’s way of lowering the cost of his uber-wheelchair as it uses the same electronics and software as the Segway).
“Could” being the key word. High tech weaponry isn’t the end-all be-all of military prowess, as should be evident to anyone who watches the news from Iraq. IMHO, the kind of combat military forces can expect to be engaged in for the foreseeable future (say the next 50+ years) is not such where Powersuits will be particularly valuable, just as our smart bombs aren’t much help at winning the hearts and minds of the opposition.
Again, the plan for these things, in the beginning will be to use them as an aid to allow the soldier to carry more gear into combat, meaning that they’ll be deployed without protective armor. Tanks have armor, and are well nigh involnerable to anything manportable, meaning that the crew inside at least has the hope of being able to ride things out until help arrives. The same with subs. Planes have ejection seats and pilots (and crew) have parachutes, so the crew has a chance to get out. This? I can’t see of anyway you can have the operator strapped in and yet be able to get out in a second or two if he or she has to.
A Monkey With a Gun, I’m well aware of what DARPA is and I even used the ARPAnet a few times back in the late 1980s. Just because they’re funding it doesn’t mean that it’s a sure-fire hit. You’ll notice that I’ve not gotten excited about the Urban Challenge being won on the first try. DARPA tends to fund projects to a certain point and then say, “Okay, now the private sector can take over.” which is fine if the private sector’s willing to put the money into it on the hope that they’ll be able to recoup their investments. That doesn’t always happen as the private sector is often just as dumb as the public sector.
Depending on the type of aircraft, the guy in the armor suit may very well be able to get out faster and safer than the guys in the plane, since not all aircraft have ejection seats OR parachutes for the crew (ie: Helicoptors and many of the bigger aircraft such as transports and EW/AWACS planes like those based on the Boeing 707 (E-3, E-8, KC-135, RC-135, etc.) As for how to get out of a powered armor suit, I can see maybe some kind of emergency setup where the front of the armor is blasted free so the soldier can just tumble out and scramble for cover (unlike the sap in the airplane, the guy in the power armor is at least unlikely to be high off the ground when he jumps out. Of course, if the armor falls on its face first, the guy may very well be stuck.
I can see lots and lots of military non-combat uses for an exoskeleton, starting almost immediately. How about picking up a 500-lb bomb to be mounted on on the wing of an F-18? It currently takes five grunts to pick one up. Wouldn’t it be a more efficient use of manpower to have one guy in an exoskeleton do it?
It may not be practical immediately, but it’s pretty impressive that they’ve gotten as far as they have. And at the speed with which technology is advancing today, I suspect we’ll see practical non-combat exoskeletons in regular use within the next ten years at most, and probably less.
Yeah, but the first guy to be wearing the exoskeleton into combat won’t have armor. It’ll be strapped to him in order that he can carry a 200 lb kit on his back. How is that guy going to get out of it in a hurry? A guy in a full-armored powersuit ala Starship Troopers probably won’t have a lot to worry about if his suit goes dead on him, so long as he’s still got oxygen. He’ll be too heavy to move without a powersuit or forklift, and be armored well enough to take the punishment from anything easily moveable with few ill effects other than a headache. (I imagine an RPG would simply shake him up a bit, but not seriously hurt him.)
Well, to be fair, even mundane un-mobile infantry go into combat wearing armor much, if not most of the time. Kevlar is still armor, even if it’s not reminiscent of Sir Lancelot. If such an exoskeleton is designed for combat, I can easily see it being equipped with somewhat more robust armor protection, though of course, if you keep adding armor onto it, you’ll just have a soldier who is harder to kill, though not necessarily being able to carry any more gear than a regular guy. I tend to doubt that you’d be able to put enough armor on something roughly man-sized that would make it more survivable than an armored vehicle. If our friend in the e-frame catches an RPG, it’ll give him more than a headache.
Ideally, you’d hit a middle ground. A soldier with far better armor than he would be able to have sans exoskeleton, and a heavier kit (bigger weapons, more ammo, etc.), hopefully even faster than a normal soldier, though not necessarily one able to run an olympic sprinting pace while carrying a 120mm smoothbore on its s houlder.
True, and insurgents are now targeting parts of the body where they’re likely to get a killshot without hitting armor. Apparently, their favored spot is the femoral artery.
Yup. I’d suspect that the first models deployed probably won’t have any additional protection benefits to them simply because the military will make the “more gear” choice over the “more armor” choice.
Tank armor is only a few inches thick and it handles RPGs just fine. There’s plenty of work being done on finding ways of making armor stronger and lighter, so it’s conceivable that in the near future RPG proof shields (similar in size and shape to ones used by riot control police) will be developed.
The real Achilles Heel of this thing is the fuel demands, IMHO. Batteries take too long to recharge (for combat operations) and swapping drained ones for fresh ones is a logistical nightmare, as it’s highly likely that in the heat of combat someone would find that the batteries they thought were fully charged aren’t. Gasoline is volatile and unless it’s consumed in a fuel cell or steam engine (Yeah, that’ll happen!) tends to be noisy when it’s converted into energy, which limits the times it can be used. I suppose that one could use an RTG to power the thing, but how many people do you know who’d be willing to walk around with a nuclear reactor on their back, especially if they’re going to be shot at while wearing it?
Covering a person in metal armor a few inches thick would take well over a thousand pounds, and you couldn’t make working joints by any strech of the imagination. Composite armor (with depleted uranium or ceramics) only gives a small multiplier, and there are no prospects for super-light armor that I’m aware of. A shield against RPGs would weigh several hundred pounds at least.