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posted by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @08:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the arc-reactor-not-found dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

MacDill Matters: Iron Man suit out at SOCom, but new innovations still needed for commandos

A competition with an entry deadline of Feb. 15 seeks innovations in 12 areas, including artificial intelligence for psychological operations, improved human performance and undetectable video manipulation.

[...] Last week, James Smith, SOCom's acquisition executive, announced that the final product, known as the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, would not match the initial sales pitch, according Patrick Tucker writing in Defense One.

"It's not the Iron Man. I'll be the first person to tell you that," Smith told the crowd at a key D.C. special operations forum. The exoskeleton, Smith told the audience, is "not ready for prime time in a close-combat environment."

Instead, Tucker writes, the technologies developed, including lightweight body armor and situational awareness in helmet displays, will be chunked off and used elsewhere, if wanted.

(Full disclosure: I work for tampabay.com - and normally would not submit articles from the site, however, in this case I think the technologies and decisions about how to use them discussed in the articles would be of interest to the community.)

Related: Exoskeletons in Industry
New Developments in the World of Exoskeletons
Japanese Exoskeleton Could Help Users Walk and Run, No Batteries Required
Russian Exoskeleton Suit Turns Soldiers Into Stormtroopers
Tethered, Soft Exosuit Can Reduce Metabolic Cost of Running
Turning Workers Into 'Super Workers' With Robotic Suits


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 15 2019, @09:47PM (5 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday February 15 2019, @09:47PM (#801783) Homepage

    I always thought super-suits were a stupid pie-in-the-sky idea like lasers and railguns.

    If you're a soldier in battlefield conditions, you need a lot of agility to run and perform the more finer tasks like tucking and rolling or kneeling to tie rope to a vehicle or something. Super-suits are more for terminator-style attacks, where the brute just stands up with bullets bouncing off him and explosions going off all around him while he mows down enemies with his minigun. And if a solution like that was needed in the battlefield then Boston Dynamics or any other defense contractor could whip up something like a humanoid robot or a remote-controlled mini-tank or something.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Friday February 15 2019, @11:00PM (3 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Friday February 15 2019, @11:00PM (#801805) Journal
    "If you're a soldier in battlefield conditions, you need a lot of agility to run and perform the more finer tasks like tucking and rolling or kneeling to tie rope to a vehicle or something."

    Yes, you do. Armorers worked from the bronze age if not before all the way through late medieval times solving the problem of how to make armor stronger without making it more encumbering. Then when firearms got popular they stopped, they found other professions, they died. Because even the best fully articulated plate wasn't heavy enough to make much of a difference against a musket.

    Now we're reinventing the stuff. We have materials that can repel small arms fire without being unfeasibly heavy, so it's back in fashion. But still kind of crude, in terms of weight distribution.

    "Super-suits are more for terminator-style attacks, where the brute just stands up with bullets bouncing off him and explosions going off all around him while he mows down enemies with his minigun."

    I wouldn't try to make a "super suit"  - at least not now, not without much better exoskeletons to make it work at least. For modern body armor I think you have to start from the understanding, first off, that NOTHING you could conceivably wear into battle is "bulletproof" - only bullet resistant. To put it another way - any suit that will stand up to heavy, sustained fire will just be too heavy, no matter how cleverly it's done. So that's not the goal. The goal is not to stand up to heavy, sustained fire, it's to provide a safety cushion that reduces casualties, that improves your chance of surviving something that would otherwise kill you outright.

    There was an incident in Iraq, probably several like this but this was captured on video and it was a perfect demonstration of what you want from modern body armor. US Soldier was shot by a sniper - stalked, lined up, pegged right in the chest from straight on in front. He drops, presumed dead, but a second later he scuttles off on his hands and knees behind cover. He had one of those plates in, and it was his lucky day.

    Of course, if the sniper had waited for a side shot - and they did learn.

    So the obvious next step is to extend the protection to cover against flanking shots. It's not all that hard to do - of course it has to add weight but if the weight is better distributed it wouldn't need to be more cumbersome.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:55PM (2 children)

      by Immerman (3985) on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:55PM (#802076)

      >if the weight is better distributed it wouldn't need to be more cumbersome.
      True - though managing to do that in a "a-few-sizes-fit-all" fashion would be a real artform.

      However, the weight would still be an issue. A soldier can only carry so much gear, and every kg spent on armor is a kg that can't be spent on other equipment.

      That where some of the recent advances in agile leg exoskeletons get interesting - we're not quite to the point of doing battlefield scrambles in them (so far as I know), but can do walking and running in a pretty natural fashion. It's not a full power-suit, the upper body is a far more articulated challenge, but augmented legs alone can greatly increase your carrying capacity and long-range endurance.

      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:20PM (1 child)

        by Arik (4543) on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:20PM (#802165) Journal
        "True - though managing to do that in a "a-few-sizes-fit-all" fashion would be a real artform."

        :)

        "It's not a full power-suit, the upper body is a far more articulated challenge, but augmented legs alone can greatly increase your carrying capacity and long-range endurance"

        They certainly could. With augmented legs you could arrange for it to support most of the the upper body armor directly. I'm afraid this wouldn't work very well if you tried to go prone however.
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday February 17 2019, @03:58AM

          by Immerman (3985) on Sunday February 17 2019, @03:58AM (#802350)

          Very true - however, at least up to a point you could deal with the weight well for brief periods, and leg augmentation would allow you to enter an engagement without being fatigued from carrying your armor and gear.

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:29AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:29AM (#801915) Homepage Journal

    They proposed to the Marines that their Robot Dogs be used to pack supplies over terrain that was too rough for vehicles.

    That would have worked _really_ well has those DogBots not been so noisy that they'd be dead-certain to give their positions away:

    The energy density required to not make the dog's power-pack too heavy, as well as the great strength required to bear heavy loads led Boston Dynamics to power its Dogs with Internal Combustion Engines.

    I Am Absolutely Serious.

    Real Soon Now I'm going to write a Wall Of Text entitled "The Failure Of Imagination". I'll name Boston's Dogs as an example. Anyone who's every watched a War Movie let alone ever been in an actual War knows very _well_ the vital importance of Keeping Fucking Quiet when you advance - or when you're trapped.

    In the case of Boston, just to send a few observers into the field in Iraq or Afghanistan, or to have a few Active Duty Troops or War On The Brown People Vets come to hang out for a day or two while they demo the DogBots would have fixed that particular Corporate Fuck-Up.

    "The Failure Of Imagination" is actually inspired by the business failure of the _only_ place where I could hang out all day long in my neighborhood; now I have to take the bus downtown to Starbucks; Tonalli's Donuts And Cream was operated by it's sole proprietor.

    What failure?

    That Donut and Cream Shop should have been called "Tonalli's Ice Cream And Lattes".

    They should have had a large Free WiFi Logo in their window.

    The never _once_ advertised in _any_ way. Just five hundred handbills to just the nearest neighborhood residents could have kept their shop prosperous.

    I - quite sadly - discussed its impending doom with the assistant manager, who completely _flummoxed_ me when she pointed out that "There are already a lot of Mexican Bread stores in this neighborhood".

    In fact, one such Mexican Bread shop was _directly_ across the street.

    In Mexico, "Pan" - literally "Bread" - "Pan" stores sell regular bread encrusted with lots of heavily encrusted, festively dyed granulated sugar. While Pan occupies the same Ecological Niche in Mexico as Donuts do here, Donuts are in no way anything like Mexican Breads.

    Their store's sign was not lit up at night as are its two neighboring stores; to conserve on its electric bill, the lights in the back are kept shut off during the day, and it's employees just about _always_ sat in the back of the store so they could listen to music - that's where the store's speakers were.

    They generally shut off that music when a customer would enter.

    They _finally_ clued in to that for the front to be empty lead many prospective new customers to conclude it was closed, so only in the last three months did its employees sit in the front when they weren't serving customers.

    They had a restroom, but with a sign posted on it that said "Employees Only". It's _only_ because just _some_ of Tonalli's staff permitted me to use it anyway that I became a Regular there.

    They don't sell Wholesale Donuts - there's lots of cafes and breakfast joints that would have happily bought some every morning.

    Their Portland location failed too.

    Despite all that, their original Vancouver location - far from me, I'm sorry to say - is quite profitable, so they're just sad, not overcome with grief: they will try yet one more time - their only Portland shop failed too - with some other location.

    But what they _won't_ do is....

    Learn From Their Mistakes.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]