Army Mechanic’s Garage Tinkering Yields 18-Foot Mecha Exoskeleton

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

I’ve talked about how I wanted to be Iron Man before, and this guy is doing it. This Aussie should team up with Bear Suit Guy and his MJOLNIR-reminiscent Trojan body armor so they can create something truly spectacular.

I’ve also been following the HALproject for awhile. This one is a man-sized suit that increases the strength of the wearer several fold and it all runs on battery power. Super slick, and I’m not surprised it’s being developed by the Japanese. What’s hilarious and unnerving at the same time, is the company that plans to produce these units is Cyberdyne.

I’ll be back

Edit: Here are some links – I haven’t viewed them, but I’m sure they’re content-tastic.

• Here’s a really short video of it in action
• Here’s the designer talking about it
• And here’s his website (under construction, but with some technical info)

I stole these links and even the intro text from a slashdot comment.

I need to post more, and I can cheat by using the articles I read on Slashdot to fill content. This is really cool though.

I didn’t read the original article the Slashdot summary links to (this is standard fare for Slashdot – only newbs actually read the articles), but my takeaway from the summary is a robot came up with a hypothesis, predicted the result, experimented, and observed & recorded data. This is capital H-u-g-e Huge.

Is this robot artificially or synthetically intelligent though? My vote is ‘artificial’ as it has not proven its own awareness, but this is a gigantic leap in the field.