Techno trousers!

[totherme]

I'm amazed I haven't been following this for some time. I mean, how could I fail to notice someone building working strength enhancing robot exo-suits? But no - the first I heard about it (about this team - I knew vaguely about some US folk having battery issues) was when I saw the BBC video yesterday

Comments

[surfnscubadiver]

I suspect that the buttery pack will be particularly useful for picnics.

I expect that the big suitcase was full of bread and jam.

[pozorvlak]

Awesome, if it's true. The sheer number of SF refs (suit looks like the ones in Tron, named after HAL 9000, company shares a name with the one from the Terminator films) makes me a little suspicious, however (and I can't see most of the video - damn flaky connection). There's a Wikipedia page here, but it doesnt' give much more information.

Have you seen this guy? The one who makes the bear protection suits? It's kinda sad, really, in that he's now close to declaring bankruptcy for the second time.

[totherme]

I'm pretty sure it's genuine. Their URL is http://sanlab.kz.tsukuba.ac.jp/HAL/indexE.html - so I had a look at http://www.tsukuba.ac.jp/eng/edu_college.html

You can follow the link trail to the HAL guys. In the "Admissions" box on the bottom right of that main page, click "Doctoral Programs". Then from the 4th row of the table of research areas, select "Systems and Information Engineering". On that page, click "Intelligent Interaction Technologies", and from the sidebar of the resulting page click "Faculty members". On that page, in the section "Man-machine System and Robotics", the chap you want is "Yoshiyuki Sankai", whose areas of interest are described as "Cybernics : Cybernoid, biorobotics, control, biomedical engineering