Suit Up

There are many different types of exoskeletons, but we can think of them in maybe four categories to make things easier. First, there's the basic “full body exoskeleton,” like the one in "Iron Man." Depending on the design, you might strap the exoskeleton onto your arms, legs and waist. When you move, the exoskeleton moves in exactly the same way you do, but stronger. The exoskeleton is the same size you are. Exoskeletons like these could be used by anyone who needs to do heavy lifting. The exoskeleton might also make it possible to run faster or jump higher. It is also easy to imagine someone, perhaps a senior citizen or a disabled person, who could use a small strength boost to do everyday things easily. For example, if a senior citizen's muscles need an extra bit of power for getting up and walking, an exoskeleton could help.

The second type of exoskeleton handles just one part of the body. For example, the Army has been experimenting with exoskeletons just for the legs. The idea is to help soldiers march farther while wearing heavy backpacks.

Image courtesy of Dr. Kazerooni, University of California at Berkeley UC Berkeley is developing two exoskeletons - the ExoHiker (pictured above) and the Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (BLEEX, pictured below). The ExoHiker will enhance its wearer's walking ability and BLEEX will give its wearer added strenght for carrying heavy loads.

Image courtesy of Dr. Kazerooni, University of California at Berkeley

The third kind of exoskeleton acts like a full body exoskeleton, but it makes a person bigger as well as stronger. Imagine an exoskeleton that is five stories tall. Now imagine that the exoskeleton gives a person the ability to construct the steel frame of a building as though the steel beams were toothpicks. It's easy to imagine giant exoskeletons helping with construction, mining, earth moving and so on. This kind of system has appeared in several movies and cartoons like the long-running Japanese Gundam series, but it is not yet common in the real world. In Gundam, the exoskeletons are so big that the "wearer" sits inside a cockpit in the torso and controls all the extremities from there.

The fourth kind of exoskeleton takes the person outside of the exoskeleton. Imagine that you are moving your body, but the exoskeleton that is responding to you is 10, 100 or even 1,000 miles away. This is sometimes called tele-presence.

Image courtesy of NASA The Centaur, a tele-presence robot in development at NASA, will let astronauts explore hostile environments without having to leave the safety of their spacecraft.

Tele-presence is already being used to create surgical robots. A surgeon drives the robot with his or her hands. The robot then mimics the surgeon's movements. The knife or the stitching needle moves inside the patient in response to the surgeon, even though the surgeon is sitting five feet away. The cool thing is that the knife is tiny, and it might have gotten inside the patient using a tube that is far smaller than the surgeon's hand. Right now, the surgeon sits in the same room as the surgical robot, but it's possible to consider a separation of many miles.

Image courtesy of NASA Dr. Mehran Anvari (right) assists and mentors astronaut/aquanaut Robert B. Thirsk through a laparoscopic procedure on a training model during a training session for the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) project.

There are still a few problems to work out. For example, imagine that the Army wants to give a soldier an exoskeleton so he can march 20 miles while carrying a 300-pound backpack. Where does the power for the exoskeleton's motors come from? Batteries, perhaps? If so, the power supply is big and heavy, and you have to recharge it every night. Is it a gas-powered generator? That is big and heavy too, and might be noisy. Exoskeletons used in factories and construction sites are easier to handle in this regard because they can plug into the grid for power.

Heavy Metal Photo by Zade Rosenthal TM & ©2007 Marvel ©2007 MVLFFLLC. All rights reserved. When Don Heck, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Larry Lieber first conjured the character "Iron Man" in 1963, it's unlikely they imagined that real-world scientists would one day be taking a cue from their comic book super hero. But with characteristics like superhuman strength, full-body, weapon-proof armor and flight-enabling jetboots, it's no wonder scientists want to create fact from fiction. And did we mention the heavy-duty armor also comes with an array of artillery and communications equipment? To see Lee and company's vision come to life – well at least on the big screen, you can check your local theaters this month to see Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man. As you'll see, Iron Man is the exoskeleton of all exoskeletons.