US Army Furthers Development of Robotic Suits

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on advancements in the US military's robotic exoskeleton program. It's being spearheaded by Sarcos, a research laboratory in Utah. The firm has designed the XOS exoskeleton for US Army use, a lightweight frame that gives the user greater strength and endurance. 'With the exoskeleton on and fully powered up, Rex can easily pull down weight of more than 90 kilos, more than he weighs. For the army the XOS could mean quicker supply lines, or fewer injuries when soldiers need to lift heavy weights or move objects around repeatedly. Initial models would be used as workhorses, on the logistics side. Later models, the army hopes, could go into combat, carrying heavier weapons, or even wounded colleagues.'"

The designing engineers.

[AltGrendel]

The designing engineers were primarily from Japan.

Re:I wonder though

[dreamchaser]

Remote control will probably never be quite as good as having a human brain inside guiding it. The idea is to augment a soldier's physical abilities. As we know they already have battle robots that are operated remotely. This fills a different need. It's hard to judge how fast technology progresses or will progress, but I can conceive of Starship Trooper (the book, not that horrid movie) style gear in a hundred years or less.

Re:I wonder though

[TimeTraveler1884]

I can see a couple of reasons:

• Balance and dexterity of humans is available to the machine.
• Human decision making, feature recognition, senses and empathy are all available to the machine.
• Resilience, if the machine is damaged, the squishy bits can crawl out and still fight for a brief extended time.

Computing and robotics are not yet to the state that any of these can equate to the level of human ability.

Re:No Iron Man tag?

[Moraelin]

Nah. This is clearly a BattleTech Elemental [wikipedia.org] armour. Or will end up used as one.

Now what I want is a proper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mech [wikipedia.org]. I mean, they just need to make this thing 10m tall and give it a nuclear reactor as a power source, right?

Re:I wonder though

[hey!]

Remote control will probably never be quite as good as having a human brain inside guiding it.

Why not though? I'd like to see an airtight argument that practical powered armor is, net, more effective than an ROV. It's not that ROVs can, in the near future, replace soldiers, but in any case where you can imagine a suit like this being practical, surely an ROV would be more practical.

After all, soldier carry a lot of stuff, basically as much as physically possible without being a net impairment. The suit and its battery simply add to this, so surely such a suit would have to multiply the soldier's muscle power considerably. In that case, moving about is accomplished by muscles controlling actuators, and would, I'm guessing, be limited by that. So while I can imagine a scenario where a lightly but appropriately armed soldier outperforms either an ROV or suited soldier, I am doubtful that a suited soldier will outperform a solider running an ROV, especially considering the lower hazard the ROV operator encounters.

Now here's another possiblity. If a practical power suit is possible, why not issue every soldier a robotic mule to carry his stuff, or possibly even him?

Re:the path to Heinlein's Starship Troopers?

[lymond01]

Starship Troopers (the book) should be the main scifi reference to powered suits. Iron Man is fine, but Heinlein describes the idea very well: "You don't control the suit. You wear it, like putting on your shirt in the morning, you don't really notice its there. Except this suit makes a battalion of Sherman tanks look like cockroaches to a bazooka." (I...very badly...paraphrase.)

Build a bigger, badder suit, armored head to toe, so it can carry the power supply as well.

Re:Why bother?

[PinkyDead]

I suspect that these kind of things have a less obvious purpose - as marketing tools to justify military spending.

Take NASA, for instance, people didn't mind huge amounts being spent on it when there was something exciting and heroic to see - such as landing on the moon. As soon as the job became routine and much more practical, no one was interested and they got their funding cut.

If the military regularly rolls out these futuristic and legitimately expensive pieces of kit - then the public interest is maintained and so is the funding.

It also forces (allows) foreign powers to (happily) up their game and raise the stakes further - giving further justification for more spending.

Re:No Iron Man tag?

[crawling_chaos]

Look up "high center of gravity" and get back to me on why Mechs are a colossally stupid idea.

Re:No Iron Man tag?

[sumdumass]

There is plenty of use in close quarter inner city style combat situations. The exoskeleton allows for heavier armor that isn't limited to the bodies normal strength or physical endurance constraints. It can also allow larger volumes of ammo to be carried which means smaller unit teams could last longer in firefights making the use of manpower somewhat more efficient in these situations where a larger tank wouldn't do well.

You might even have the ability to mount 360 degree video directly transmitted to a remote location for processing with the ability to carry the extra weight of a larger power source. You can now employ bulkier sensors like Infra red and electro magnetic imagine with a friend or foe acquisition system that could allow the soldier to see threats through walls and make judgment calls about someone holding an AK47 or with a couple of pounds of Semtex and grenades under their shirt.

It might not be too difficult to make them bomb/explosive proof/resistant either. Maybe by employing a explosion deflection shield as something heavy and carried in front of the soldiers that can be dropped and used to divert the energy of some blasts around them.

I agree that it is usesless in open warfare. You would be better served by larger and more efficient tracked or wheeled vehicles or maybe even an all terrain quadrupedal implementation carrying multiple soldiers at one. But I think the special tactical situations of close quarter urban combat lends some uses that could be somewhat useful even if it is to carry robots that do the dirty work. Can you imagine a bomb disposal bot carried in a rucksack on one of these things that a soldier could carry on foot patrol and use to check out suspicious items on found in their paths? It would be especially nice if the costs was less then outfighting a Humvee for the same missions but could cover the same number of troops with as much confidence. Drive them in, drop them off, and let them get busy.

Re:No Iron Man tag?

[jollyreaper]

I want an advanced armored exoskeleton. Make it fly too. I can do without the repulors if I MUST, but please do give me a big flamethrower and a chaingun on my model. Maybe some shoulder mounted RPG's too?

The problem is that you're still a squishy human inside. It would make more sense to operate robotic weapons platforms remotely, in conjunction with decent enough local AI on the unit itself. The scifi example would be from Night's Dawn where the are no starfighters per se, that role is taken over by combat drones called wasps. The mothership releases the wasps and those unmanned units perform the high-G maneuvers that would turn humans to jelly. The mothership than then move along a saner flight path, not having to worry about combat G-loads on the passengers.

Harry G. Stine's old Warbots series seems like a more realistic view of high-tech combat in the future, not as much Starship Troopers, though I would dearly love to have a combat suit like that. :) In the Stine setting, VR jacks into the human nervous system have been perfected. Soldiers could operate in the field in conjunction with unmanned warbots. These were not wise-cracking droids, they had all the personality of a Predator drone. The humans could fight in conjunction with these robots, sending them ahead to draw fire, directing them with a greater level of precision than could be had back at base. They could also use a limited VR to give more precise instructions than could be achieved with verbal commands. For very complicated ops, the operators could use a VR immersion device like the chairs in Matrix to go under and teleoperate the robots.

The other factor that made these weapons so effective was a god-like view of the battlefeld thanks to sensory fusion software and tiny observation robots. You know how you can see everything so well in video games but generals on the ground are stuck with maps and radio reports? Imagine having a view of the battlefield as detailed as the video game, and pushing the fog of war back to boot. That's what they're already working on at the Army testing ranges today, using low-observable drones to loiter over the battlefield.

Now if we ever get the quantum entanglement stuff sorted out and can come up with an untrackable instant communication technology like the ansible of scifi, then hooooooly shit. Right now the biggest drawback to remotely operated robots is that the AI's just aren't good enough yet to rely on local control in the event contact is lost. Predator drones can continue their mission on autopilot and fly back in range but the last thing I want to see is an armed combat bot on the ground trying to pick targets without a human to say "no, not a target, bad robot!" If they default to inactivity when jammed, that just means the enemy gets to pick them off as their leisure.

Re:No Iron Man tag?

[emilper]

Heinlein was in the army in his youth. No need to predict "the future of the military": armor has to be heavy to be truly effective, but if it's heavy, it limits the mobility of the soldier. Generals have been drooling for ways to make soldiers able to carry bigger guns and thicker plates for millennia.

Tanks are only a compromise, since you get only one cannon for 4 to 6 crew: crew members are much harder to replace than tanks or cannons, and they would be a lot more effective and less vulnerable if you could spread them instead of having all 4 in the same place.

During WWI, before armored vehicles became used, old style armor was tried, but it was too heavy: one example here (not in English, but the pictures don't need translation) http://historiasconhistoria.blogia.com/2008/021401-luchas-medievales-en-el-siglo-xx.php [blogia.com] ...