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
Related Stories
There's an article over at Singularity Hub that the US Navy will test and evaluate Lockheed Martin’s FORTIS exoskeletons.
This is sourced from a press release from last month which states that Lockheed Martin:
has received a contract through the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) for the U.S. Navy to evaluate and test two FORTIS exoskeletons
The FORTIS exoskeleton is unpowered and :
transfers loads through the exoskeleton to the ground in standing or kneeling positions and allows operators to use heavy tools as if they were weightless
There are also articles over at gizmag, RT and wired which go into more detail on this exoskeleton programme.
With the unpowered FORTIS, together with Daewoo's powered exoskeleton trials, it looks like the practical civilian use of exoskeletons in heavy industry is a possibility in the near future.
More Exoskeleton Development from Japan
Bloomberg writes that Mitsui & Co., best known among investors as Japan's top oil and iron-ore trader, and its partners have built a wearable suit—a backpack fitted with belts and leg supports—that enhances a user's ability to lift and move heavy objects. The idea is that when worn by farmers, or at nursing homes or construction sites, strength is enhanced.
The device, known as the Assist Suit AWN-03, was developed at ActiveLink, Panasonic Corp.'s robot-development unit. Weighing in at 6 kilograms (13.2 pounds), the suit allows the wearer to lift as much as 15 kilograms without stressing the lower back, according to Mitsui, which demonstrated the outfit to media at its Tokyo headquarters on Aug. 14.
Such a machine is tailor-made for Japan, where labor shortages and a shrinking and aging population are already causing construction delays, says the trading house. But the Assist Suit is just a first step. In two years, Mitsui and its partners aim to release the next iteration, complete with mechanical arms and legs. Further out, future versions could start to take on Aliens-like proportions. "What we have in mind is the Aliens power loader," says Tomoya Tsutsumi, an official at Mitsui's construction and industrial machinery division.
General contractor Kajima Corp. and Yamato Holdings Co., which offers door-to-door parcel delivery services, are among dozens of companies planning to try the technology, according to Tsutsumi. The target is to sell 1,000 units in the initial year after the Assist Suit's release.
"Young workers tend to want to work in a more comfortable environment so businesses are having trouble finding enough workers when labor conditions are harsh," Tsutsumi said.
Article includes a Youtube video demonstrating some pretty nifty stuff.
[More After the Break]
Assistive exoskeletons are a bit like electric bikes – they do indeed give users a power boost, but part of that boost is needed just to move the extra weight along. Japanese researchers at Hiroshima University and Daiya Industry Co., however, have created a minimalist exoskeleton that does away with heavy batteries and motors. Instead, their Unplugged Powered Suit (UPS) harnesses the wearer's own weight.
The UPS consists of a pump located under the sole of the user's foot, an air hose that runs up the leg from that pump, and what's known as a Pneumatic Gel Muscle (PGM).
With each step that the wearer takes, their foot presses down on the pump. This pushes air up the hose to a hip belt, where it's relayed into the PGM. There, it temporarily causes a gel contained within the device to compress, causing the whole thing to contract and relax like a natural muscle.
See also at Aalborg University and Hiroshima University.
In a bid to make its armed forces look even more intimidating, Russia has taken inspiration from science-fiction to create some futuristic-looking new combat suits. Developed by the state-owned Central Research Institute for Precision Machine Building, this very Star Wars-esque combat armor features a powered exoskeleton, ballistic protection from bullets and shrapnel and a heads-up display. While just a concept at the moment, the suit's designers hope it will enter full production in the next few years.
While they haven't detailed what the heads-up display would be used for, the combat armor's powered exoskeleton helps the wearer carry heavy loads, bearing some of the brunt to lower the soldiers' fatigue
Source: Engadget
Story has a video on YouTube.
What if you could improve your average running pace from 9:14 minutes/mile to 8:49 minutes/mile without weeks of training?
Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University have demonstrated that a tethered soft exosuit can reduce the metabolic cost of running on a treadmill by 5.4 percent, bringing those dreams of high performance closer to reality.
"Homo sapiens has evolved to become very good at distance running, but our results show that further improvements to this already extremely efficient system are possible," says corresponding author Philippe Malcolm, former postdoctoral research fellow at the Wyss Institute and SEAS, and now assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, where he continues to collaborate on this work. The study [DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aan6708] [DX] appears today in Science Robotics.
[...] "Our goal is to develop a portable system with a high power-to-weight ratio so that the benefit of using the suit greatly offsets the cost of wearing it. We believe this technology could augment the performance of recreational athletes and/or help with recovery after injury," adds Lee.
away from the the fictional world of blockbusting movies, robotic exoskeletons offer more prosaic and useful help for humans.
The military has been in on the act for years, using them to help soldiers carry more weight for longer periods of time. Meanwhile manufacturers have been busy creating robotic suits to give mobility to people with disabilities.
But now exoskeletons are becoming an important part of the scene in more conventional workplaces, mainly because of their unique offering.
"Exoskeletons act as a bridge between fully-manual labour and robotic systems. You get the brains of people in the body of a robot," says Dan Kara, research director at ABI Research.
"But there's more to it than that. You can tie the use of exoskeletons to business benefits that are very easy to quantify. The main one is a reduction in work-related injuries, and we know that outside the common cold, back injury is the main reason people are off work."
Can exoskeletons defeat union rules?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snow on Friday February 15 2019, @09:22PM
The picture in the article looks exactly like Masterchief from Halo.
Also, Andy, I appreciate your site loads without allowing scripting. Many newspaper sites are terrible for that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Friday February 15 2019, @09:40PM (12 children)
Currently heavy body armor seems to focus on chestplates. There are both tempered steel alloy plates and composite (ceramic plus) plates that will stop 7.62 nato or better. The obvious workaround is to aim for something other than the chest of course - or get a flanking shot - but they cover head on shots to the heart and lungs and you can see how that would reduce casualty rates.
These plates are pretty expensive and the exact compositions don't seem to be disclosed. The best homemade versions I've seen were clearly inferior to those plates, but still better than your typical soft kevlar suit. That's the next level down, and the only thing that seems to be being used outside of that small chestplate area. That's usually only good against pistol cartridges, and not even the most powerful of those.
Of course that's still very worth wearing on a battlefield. If I recall my statistics correctly, fragmentation causes as many if not more injuries on the battlefield than direct fire, and even the old nylon flack jackets reduced that danger significantly.
I imagine they want to make the armor heavier - and there isn't much reason to make it heavier *per square inch* than those plates already are, but there's lots of reasons to want to expand the coverage a bit. And soldiers are already pretty heavily loaded. Overloading is bad. Exoskeletons are an obvious 'easy' technological fix - but they are far from ready from that role at this point.
If I had some venture capital I'd be tempted to see if I couldn't come up with a better interim solution than a plate in a vest pocket though. Even the weight distribution is awkward.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday February 15 2019, @09:47PM (5 children)
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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Friday February 15 2019, @11:00PM (3 children)
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)
>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)
:)
"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
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
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]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 16 2019, @02:42AM (1 child)
World War I bullet-proof vests were made of silk, it's just that there weren't enough Mulberry Trees to go around.
Don't think DARPA isn't looking into GMO Worms.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:38PM
Silk armor was more useful against arrows. It wouldn't necessarily stop them, but they could enter the body without penetrating the silk, making it easier to remove them. There are anecdotal accounts of this happening with bullets - but again, only when they're going very slowly, either from an antique pocket pistol with no power, or perhaps at extreme range. More effective, perhaps, against shrapnel.
Silk was used after that - in the T40/M6/M7 "Flyers Vest" which was WWII era kit. But it wasn't just silk - it weighed nearly 15 pounds and most of that was aluminum plating. And again, it was designed more to protect against fragmentation/shrapnel (from airburst flak guns) than from direct small arms fire.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 16 2019, @03:10AM (3 children)
It takes a special kind of soldier to wear so much heavy gear in the desert.
I know from actual experience just _why_ traditional Arab garb actually works: in the Summer of 2012, I walked two hundred miles from Santa Cruz to Oceano Dunes State Beach, just South of Pismo Beach in San Luis Obispo County.
While not actual desert, the Southern San Joaquin Valley is semi-arid. While a rich agricultural region, that can only happen due to its abundant and shallow ground water. Decades of artificial fertilizers shot that ground water completely through with such high levels of Nitrates as to be toxic to humans, so I only drank from garden hoses when I was _desperate_.
One guy who saw me walking went to a store then brought me TWO GALLONS of ice-cold spring water. "I commend you for what you are doing."
I was looking for my brother; I have some reason to believe he is in Latin America, was in 1979 he was a Circus Roustabout. The Circus has largely died out in the US but remains popular in Latin America. And yes: I fully intended to spend the rest of my life south of the border; I _still_ might.
I started traveling as the Arabs did and the Bedouins still do: I slept by day then walked by night. I also started eating cactus, flower petals and flower leaves. Once a man who spoke no English passed by in his Taco Truck then gave me a _free_ plate of plate of Hot Tamales:
"Food?"
"No dinaro!"
"Gratis!"
"VIVA LA MEXICO!"
That I the locals were so very generous helping me to walk _south_ led me to realize that it's just as common for the undocumented to go home as it is for them to come here.
But back to the turban and robes:
When I was walking on a particularly hot day, I rested in the shade for a couple hours then put on _all_ of my clothes, including a turban made of - yes - a towel!
Then just to make sure I could take the heat, I took off my shoes and socks then walked down the middle of a gravel-strewn asphalt street. As a car was approaching, it's occupants looked quite puzzled, so I started marching instead, then as they passed I smartly saluted them.
They saluted me _back_.
What it is about such heavy clothes is that it absorbs all your sweat but then _regulates_ that sweats evaporation at the surface of the cloth, so it has the effect of sweating at a constant rate rather then so-quickly is it would were your skin directly exposed to the sun, or if you only wore a t-shirt.
While it's _quite_ hot to wear Arab Dress, it really _is_ far cooler to wear it than it is to wear a t-shirt then run out of water in one's body.
That's Heat Stroke, and is _deadly_. Heat Exhaustion is the exhaustion of Sodium and Potassium in one's blood, and is the reason our troops eat salt tabs like they were M&M candy.
But if you have Heat Stoke, your _only_ hope for survival is to Drink Water - IMMEDIATELY! It _won't_ help to get into the shade.
My very life was saved by a rural church's garden clothes. I even saturated my clothing then attended it's service.
And I really _did_ thank the Baby Jesus, because that day was one of the days my time had come the very closest to Meeting My Maker.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:24AM (1 child)
Why are you talking like _this_? I *really* want to _know_.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @07:53PM
Because html formatting tags are a pain.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday February 16 2019, @12:44PM
Yes, traditional outfits of desert dwellers from Arabia to Mexico take advantage of that.
And armor screws with it. Just one more factor to consider in designing modern armor.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 15 2019, @10:00PM (3 children)
"It's not the Iron Man. I'll be the first person to tell you that,"
No shit. Iron Man is based on magical "technology" that only exists in a comic-book universe. We can't store that kind of power in a suit, or the reaction mass it would need to fly.
Smart helmets could be useful, if the enemy can't jam them, but a suit is silly.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Friday February 15 2019, @10:14PM (2 children)
It's also said that if you did have the arc reactor, the amounts of energy used would just burn/melt you.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:38AM (1 child)
The same way having a stream engine would be useless because. ..
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Saturday February 16 2019, @06:14PM
Because cramming a locomotive-size steam engine in to a cube 4 inches to a side while maintaining equivalent power output, would result in enough energy in a small enough space to just burn/melt you and whatever it was mounted on.
The fact it's 'comic book technology' isn't what makes it fictional. The fact that it breaks some or all of the laws of thermodynamics is. Interestingly enough, when you take actual, real technology (like a steam engine, which isn't at all useless) and then propose to do absurd things with it (shrink it to something that fits on your chest, like the fictional Iron Man's also-fictional miniaturized arc reactor), you generally find it's impossible because you're trying to break those laws again.
- D
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 16 2019, @02:41AM (2 children)
Consider that the _specific_ reason that a telegraph operator at what at the time was the Ground Station for America's Spy Satellites - the former Onizuka Air Force Station in Mountain View, known by the locals as "The Blue Cube" for its large, roughly cubical windowless light-blue building totally _surrounded_ by radio dishes - sold _all_ of their transmissions to the Soviets is that the CIA was committing a bald-faced Act Of War upon the nation of Australia [wikipedia.org]:
in 1975, the people of Australia were decidedly leftist, so the CIA deposed the Prime Minister of Australia; that telegraph operator was _reading_ the CIA's orders and intelligence to its Down Under Field Agents, and was _reading_ those Field Agent's Phone Calls Home.
That didn't sit well with home, so he printed out the lot of those cables then set the KGB up with him.
Even so, the Prime Minister _was_ dismissed!
The CIA as well was committing rampant Psychological Operations against the Australian People _themselves_, as it was feared that Australia might go Communist someday.
Just read a few SN stories about the goings-on there to ascertain just how "Communist" the Aussie's are today.
As for Articificially Intelligent PsyOps? The Mind Simply Reels.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:29AM (1 child)
You _need_ to take _your_ meds. _Knot_ some_one_ elses. _yours_. _soon_. Nip _it_ in the _bud_
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:42PM
Consider that I'm quite diligent about taking them.
The Falcon and the Snowman was a non-fiction books. That Telegraph - actually Teletype - operator got Life for Treason.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]