Wearable Robot

You gotta love the stuff that comes out of funding from the US Department of Defense. I was reading in this article about robotics inventor Stephen Jacobsen and his demonstration of an exoskeleton that provides superhuman strength. It's actually quite wild. To pull a piece from the article:

In a large room next to the hangar, Jacobsen unveils the end result of all this tinkering: a prototype lower-body exoskeleton, standing on a treadmill behind a blue curtain. Each leg has powered joints at the hip, knee, and ankle and about 20 sensors, all coordinated by an onboard PC in a backpack attached to the frame. Strap it on, go for a walk on the treadmill or up and down stairs while carrying a 90-kilogram load on your back, and it feels as if you’re carrying nothing, says Jacobsen. You can even balance on one foot with a person on your back and barely feel any more fatigued than if you were standing by yourself, he adds. The exoskeleton adds strength because it stays in parallel with the user’s legs and pushes on the ground. But this is just a test unit, says Jacobsen. “When you start building systems of elements, all of which are complex, and you put them together,” he says, “you have to test if they work together in a combined way.”

After I said Wow!, it kind of made me think of robots they strapped onto themselves in the Matrix Revolutions.