That Sarcos Iron Man Suit We Never Hear About Anymore

An update on the Sarcos Exoskeleton I mentioned:

"With a tethered power source, you could likely see [the exoskeleton deployed] within five years," says Fraser Smith, vice president of operations for Raytheon Sarcos, located in Salt Lake City. "For a suit that operates on its own power, it's probably more like a decade away."

I've cross-referenced this XKCD comic, for your reference.


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Iron Man's Hands

Building an Iron Man suit is hard (of course). That's why Sarcos/Raytheon's suit disappeared into vaporware, why the HULC exoskeleton barely registers google searches, and why no one is pulling them out of suitcases out at grand prix race and defeating guys with plasma-powered whips.

But if you're going to build it, you have to start somewhere. Here's something I find completely astounding, for two reasons. Reason Number One is that it is almost the exact design I proposed to my friend Josh a month ago and am pleased to see that I am good at conjecturing how to build powered arms. Reason Number 2 is that its not just a prototype - people are actually using it.

Festo's design has a key feature: pneumatics. This presents one advantage and one disadvantage. The advantage is that a pneumatic actuator and its peripheral support systems are much smaller than hydraulics. The disadvantage, as any good engineer will tell you, is that gas is compressible, so controlling a pneumatic actuator is a nightmare compared to a hydraulic one.

"What do you mean?" says the non-engineering-background reader. Well, let me explain. Let's say you had a bike pump and you wanted to air up your tires. The bike pump is basically an pneumatic actuator: you apply a force and the air moves. Ever pushed down really fast on your bike pump? It bounces back. That basically means it is "hard to control." Now let's move to hydraulics. If you've ever used a hydraulic jack to lift up a car (because you had a flat) you know that there's not that bounce. You apply a force, the jack moves. Apply a force quickly and the jack moves quickly.
This is an over-simplified case, but the truth is universal. People have been messing with pneumatics for prosthetics for years. McKibben Artificial Muscles are basically Really Well Engineered Balloons that are rapidly inflated or deflated to simulate muscle motion.

So the Festo hand system intrigues me. But at the same time, as an anatomist I see a problem: their actuators are two way.

"What do you mean?" says the non-anatomy-background reader. Well, let me explain. In the human body, every muscle does the same thing: it contracts. So our bodies have an "antagonist" muscle to pair with every "agonist." The simplest example is the bicept in your arm (flex it tough guy, I dare you) and the tricep, whose job is to do the exact opposite thing the bicep does. In your thigh, the quadriceps and the hamstring act as an agonist-antagonist pair.
This Festo system uses a single actuator for both. And therein lies the reason for the convoluted design. This is an unnatural way to create an artificial hand. I mean, I laud Festo's efforts. Their powered glove is beautiful and functional.

But its not perfect.


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Driverless Cars, Ctd

The Atlantic pays Alexis Madrigal a lot of money to basically outline what I outlined for free TWO YEARS ago.

This isn't a knock on Madrigal. I think he's a great writer and I like many of his articles. But they should pay him to produce quality original content, not to regurgitate what thinkers in this field have been touting as obvious for years.


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Not to be a jerk but...

Can we all please agree that stick-on mustaches, mustaches on sticks, and fake monocles are officially over?

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J.K Rowling

Is a good writer. Not so good at doing interviews.

But you know what, I’m proud I was writing under the conditions under which I was writing.

That makes my head hurt to read.

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About 9/11...

Dear kids of America under 15:

If you were 3 when it happened, I am more than happy to have you post something memorial about 9/11 on your Facebook wall.

But please, please stop saying "Never Forget." You were probably still in diapers. You can't forget something if you weren't aware it happened.

It'd be like me saying "Challenger explosion: never forget."

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Jason

Out here at work, we've got a pop machine and a snack machine. The prices are outrageously high. It used to be just a pop machine, but then they added the snack machine, asking $0.90 for the smallest of items. This made me angry, both because of the slow roll of inflation but also because I could buy two of the same item at a grocery store for that price - was the convenience charge really 100%?
So I fashioned a hilarious meme to put on the vending machine. I was going to print it and tape it to the machine...I figured the rest of the folks out here would find it hilarious. Of course they would! I'm hilarious! I left it here on my desk Friday when I went home, and forgot to put it up.

I was down in the break room, heating my lunch today, when two men came in. One appeared to be in his fifties, the other in his late 20's. The younger one, I immediately noticed, had a strangely-shaped skull, and as the older man talked to him kindly...slowly...a picture began to form in my head and the crushing weight of shame descended.

"Jason" is a mentally-challenged person about the same age as me. His job is to ride around in a van he cannot legally drive and refill the vending machines at various businesses here in the southwest corner of Kansas City that have signed up to have their machines filled by a cooperative called Johnson County Developmental Supports. The older man is his guide in this: he drives the van, helps count the money, helps Jason load the right cans of pop back into the machine and the right snacks into the other machine. And off they go to their next location. It's inefficient, meticulous - and completely explains the high vending machine prices.

And there I had stood, last Friday, smugly chuckling to myself about my hilarious yet-to-be-deployed meme.

It's a tough thing for me to do, writing this. I'm a proud man. I have a master's degree in engineering. I am the star engineer at my company. I've got everything going for me, and I knew it all weekend as I strutted around the city with an arrogant confidence that one gets when one has nothing to fear and turns a blind eye to his own weakness(es).
Then there's Jason. What separates me from him? A few tweaked genes is probably all. A dice-roll, and 3 billion base pairs, and I sailed through unhindered. Him? Not so much. And so I get to live my charmed life, work hard at a job I love, make lots of money, raise a family, create the future, while Jason's life is one spent filling vending machines and living in a group home.

And what of the selfless soul - the older man - who is helping Jason put soda in a machine? How can I possibly look a man of that caliber in the face? I am a shadow of this man. Had I put the picture up on that vending machine its meaning would have been lost on Jason, of that I'm sure (thank God). But the kind older man...he'd have seen it, and my heart clenches like a fist thinking of him internalizing my sarcastic complaint.

"Whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me."

Eyes wet with tears of shame, I went back down to the break room, asked Jason for a Coke while the machine was still open, gave him my dollar, and thanked him. I hate feeling like this. I hate it. But every time I do, it's my own damn fault.
I am not ashamed of being smart. I am ashamed that I take it for granted.

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Triple Post-Humanity Article Day

Three articles that all showed up on my feed this morning:

Article 1: Man Walks With Aid of Brain-Controlled Robotic Legs

Article 2: Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINS, Other Personal Data

Article 3: What Will Happen to Humanity After We Upload Our Brains?

Hello future.

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