http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39386045/ns/te...ch_and_gadgets/
kind of cool
I guess in Shdowrun 2070 it would be military armor with strength enhancements.

Hm... okay, that second version at least looks like you could weld some armor on it... and some kind of minigatling on the arm or something *g*.

Hm, i am still interested in the energy consumption though. Same as for that big-dog robot and such thingies. I always think they would run out after 10-30 minutes. How good is the energy storage/conversation rate in modern robots anyway? (If they have to carry their own stuff)

Read about a robot being able to refuel by consuming organic matter. (Where the people were so shocked because they thought the robot would eat dead bodies... it would actually eat dry wood and such). Hm... How far can one get with an atomic battery (betavoltic or something) Lots of power, long lasting... but they can't get out much in short amount of time...

The current one probably does run out of power fast but it is still worth it as an aid to moving heavy things. Something that would need a forklift to movie safely could be moved by this. There is a gap between what a human can lift and the heavy weights that a fork lift is normally meant for. Probably the third gen one will be actually worth using. I could see them being used in construction. Reminds me of Appleseed and Alien's 2.

I'll give you an example. My buddy is in the marines. He and some people he works with are given a task with a deadline. It involved getting a 50 gallon barrel up onto a rack inside a tent. The tent had some multi ton vehicle currently with no engine in it. They would have gotten a tow truck (which they did know how to operate) to pull out the vehicle and then used a forklift to put the barrel in the rack, but there was construction materials all around this tent that they would also have to move. With a deadline that did not take all these unforeseen complications into account my buddy and his coworkers did something dangerous. They used a jack and 5 people to manhandle this thing onto its rack. It slipped and my friend lost a bit of one of his fingers and could easily have lost a hand.

In the same situation they could have used two of these exoskeleton things and got the job done. The 30 minute battery life would not have mattered.

The one man missile loading example may be most interesting, as i think one need perhaps 3-4 people pr missile today.

and the flexibility of this system outperforms any forklift or similar.

The basic problem now is that i think there is 3-4 people working logistics for each person in the field. If this system can bring the ratio down closer to 1:1 it will free up a whole lot of manpower.

And notice that it can also be tethered. if one need to load or unload a bunch of stuff in a fixed location, plug it in and keep going all day.

SLC, hunh? Those LDS types sure do love some robots, neh?

They do. This particular model is more Aliens than Warhammer - still badass, IMO - but it does make me wonder whether or not a diesel generator could power an armored version to do the Iron Man bit - maybe sans flying.

I'm picturing this in maybe two generations as a physical therapy aid. Not full mobility asst (I think they have something like that already though) but one that just helps.

The tethered thing would make it useful in a fixed area like a hanger or aircraft carrier. Depending on stability add some jacks to the legs/feet and reach higher up.

This one's been around for some time - I saw it a year ago or more. There's also the Japanese version that's more mobile - HAL. There's also the Honda one.

If these guys get together and have some wierd 3-way brainchild, the world will be an amazing place really quickly.

Another RL news bit.

More Drones.. wheeled autonomous security. The answer to rent-a cops?

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2...obotic-sentries

nothing a good RPG can't deal with...

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2010/...walk_again.html

'Bout time.

I've been keeping up with Raytheon Sarcos for years now. What really gets me hot about their stuff is that it's hydraulic, the potential for which is amazing. The power limitations and whatnot have always bugged me especially since Japan's Cyberdyne and their Hybrid Assistive Limb suit can multiply your strength by a factor of 10 and have enough juice for 2 hours.

You're talking about EATR. The shock the people had is understandable, I remember reading that EATR could get a helluva lot more energy from dead bodies than it could from bark mulch.

As to the atomic powering idea, I like that, and the new supercapacitor tech could solve the duration problem. Does anyone remember the Ford Nucleon concept from the 60s? A mini nuclear reactor for thousands of miles of driving, maybe that could be adapted.

If the tethering was portable and contained in the suit it'd be even more convenient. Like those vacuums with cord retrators.

Wireless power is even coming along pretty good these days. Imagine if one of these could tap into the grid wirelessly from even a few feet away (IIRC 10 feet is the distance they got it up to at MIT). Most places in a city have the grid a few feet away and supercapacitor tech dispursed through the suit would make it so that you didn't need to stay near a powerline (or plug outlet if you were tethering).

I also remember hearing tales of an ultra high output black silicon solar panel type device constructed by MIT that could be useful for keeping capacitors topped up.

That link with the paraplegics walking using HULC derived tech put a frog in my throat. Good show.

I think the whole thing really comes down to collating data and technologies. A few of the ones I've listed here could possibly be used to really offset the need for tethering, if not totally circumvent it.

IIRC they were using liquid salt at like 3,000 degrees F or something to retain the heat. You must be a daily reader of SlashDot like myself to keep up with all that stuff.

This reminds me, I've been seeing ads for some show about advanced robotics/AI on either science or discovery. Looked cool, they had an anthroform (4 legged) drone that was walking along, and someone kicked it, and it actually caught itself.

Also, what was the first generation? I've seen this one for a few months now at least.

BigDog?





-k

Haha among many other places.



That was EPIC! Man I had no idea that particular tech had come so far. I usually ignore drone stuff.

Yeah, that was it.

Big-Dog is fairly old-ish. Heck, they have some steam-powered versions.

... That is not to say that it's so old it originated as steam powered. Just that it is old. And they also have some steam powered.

Yeah, if it originated with steam power... scary.

But yeah, it is on a channel called 'green planet', and the show is called 'Dean of Invention'. Sounded like it was going to involve all kinds of other stuff like nanobots. I'll have to find that channel.

Gasoline contains about 35 MJ per litre. 1 litre would cover the energy expenditure of a grown man for 3 days, and that's including all the overhead of maintaining the body. If such a suit required 5 times the energy of our bodies, the soldier only needs 1.5 litres of gasoline per day to power it, less than his water requirements in hot environments.

If we don't want to use combustion engines, lithium ion batteries would be an alternative - if you take the Tesla Roadster, it has 450kg (1000 lbs) of batteries storing 190 MJ. 100 kgs (220 lbs) of batteries could power such a suit for a day.

Including to carry the additional weight of the batteries/fuel/engine?

That was my concern. I would figure on this suit weighing about 800-1200 lbs after armor, electronics, engine, fuel storage, and pilot survival supplies are added. I think it'd require a great deal more than 1.5L a day.

Another thing I'm wondering about the gasoline. Is that 35 MJ/L figure the amount of total energy in the gasoline? Or the 30% the can be derived from a combustion engine? If the former, then combustion will only yield about 12 MJ/L, if the latter then the actual total is over 105 MJ/L.

I don't know, but we're comparing to what energy we put into a human body, and our bodies are inefficient too, plus we have lots of overhead going to just keeping cells alive and running, growing new cells, breathing and pumping blood around, even to stand still requires muscle activity.

Even if my estimates were off by factor 2 or 5, it is still clear that powering stuff like this isn't impossible, it isn't even that hard. I think people overestimate the power problem because they're thinking in terms of toys with crap batteries that run dry quickly. That's not the right way to look at it. You should be looking at stuff like excavators. A 30 ton excavator can dig and shovel tons of dirt around at around 30 litres per hour - I don't know if you can conclude that a 1 ton miniexcavator uses 1L per hour digging dirt, but even if was 2 or 3 L per hour, we're still looking at more power and much harder work than you'd need for a soldier's suit. Look at how far a 2 ton car can drive on a single liter of fuel. Look at how small an engine and fuel tank can get a human flying in an ultralite.

Now think about how far any of those performances are from what a human can do. And this suit just needs to outdo human performance by a factor 5 to allow it to weigh 800lbs - I think engine and fuel would fit in a backpack. Gasoline is really, really powerful stuff. Lithium ion batteries aren't too shabby either.

While i can't back it up by numbers, it would surprise me if a combustion engine is more effective then the human body in converting fuel to energy.

Efficiency is not the same as power density. You can store and produce a lot of power (in terms of both peak output and duration) with relatively little space and weight using internal combustion. Power density is what makes robotics possible, not efficiency.

Perhaps, but for the purposes of powered armor we want both. If an ICE cannot produce the power needed to move this thing without burning many liters of fuel/day, then there's no sense in using it.

Especially if that fuel storage can be punctured.

Need to develop a micro fusion power plant.

Because it's just damn intimidating to face an enemy that could explode and incinerate the entire battlefield if you shoot at him.



-k

The global efficiency of a human being is not really something to brag about, roughly 20%.

Internal combustion engines today are around 30% for gasoline up to 45% in ideal condition for the best turbo-diesel. Even after inclunding losses in the transmission you're likely to end up more efficient than a human.

Nooo Dahrken, animals must be much better than technology!

I would have guessed it a bit lower, actually. Plants extract energy of sunlight at around 6% efficiency, much less than solar panels, something I've had quite a lot of difficulty convincing some tree-hugging types of. Next to "you shouldn't eat more antioxidants", the poor performance of biological systems is one of the most difficult pieces of scientific fact to get people to understand.

I read some math somewhere that said humans are only 7% efficient.

Contrary to popular belief (and Battletech) fusion reactors aren't explosive. Any loss of magnetic containment would simply stop the reaction and the plasma would collapse back into gas. The most you'd get would be a local (like, just the pilot) burst of radiation and maybe a capacitor or other electrical component going up in smoke. Less impressive than a car's gas tank going up. That said, a fusion reactor smaller than a house is still pretty much science fiction.

7% of what, exactly? If we converted 7% of the energy stored in food into useable energy we'd be able to live for a hundred years off a Twinkie. Nuclear fission of U-238 is only 1% efficient by that scale. That's why I hate science reduced to statistics and soundbites... any time you talk about a percentage, you have to determine what the theoretical 100% really means.

Okay. Fission reactor it is then!



-k

Probably 7% of the caloric potential.



-k

I'm going to track it down.

i wonder how small one can make a thorium reactor...

Hell, i think one video out there makes the claim that they considered one as a power plant for a bomber...

Has anyone considered that Ford nucleon tech I mentioned earlier? I'm not an engineer or physicist, but could that be adapted?

Not by a long shot, as just as with the nuclear-powered bombers, the power to weight ratio (when one add shielding) makes it a brick...

Here we go, human 7% efficiency figures.

Glucose to ATP conversion is 44% efficient.

ATP to muscle energy conversion is 65% efficient.

Muscle energy conversion to motion after frictional losses is 25% efficient.

.44 x .65 x .25 = .0715

But 44% and 65% of what? What is the scale?

That's what TheScrivener was asking.




-k

My guess is only 44% of the glucose gets turned into ATP, the rest gets used for other things in the krebs cycle. Same with ATP in the muscles, 65% gets converted to motive force, the rest gets lost as heat and chemical waste. As to frictional losses, if the muscles can generate 100 hp of work, internal and external friction reduces that 100 hp to 25?

IMHO 44% / 65% of the chemical energy stored in the molecule and able to be released by chemicla reactions.

Say you start with 100 Joules of energy sotred in glucose. If all the glucose is converted into ATP, the ATP molecules only represent 44J, the rest is wasted. I don't know how, maynbe as heat, maybe locked in metabolic wastes of the process.

Now those 44J are brought into the muscle cells, and used to power contractions. To ATP-to-contraction reaction produce 28.6 J of mechanical work, the remaining 15.4 are again lost.

Finally friction use up 21.45 J converted into heat, leaving only 7.15 J of mechanical energy to effectively move something.

Seems it is the friction part that is the real loss leader.

This is more or less correct. The process of converting glucose to ATP requires energy to happen, so that is where that first energy loss comes from. Similarly, the process of converting ATP to movement in the muscles requires energy to happen.

I am surprised that friction wastes so much energy though, considering that external friction is entirely negligible.


That said, the above storage number for gasoline is for how much it contains. Modern engines in vehicles only manage to convert 15% of that to forward movement. They are currently working on engines that would be roughly 60% efficient in converting that energy to forward movement. Presuming a figure similar to that of a car, you'd actually need about 7 times the amount of fuel as the pure energy required for the system. (Maybe as little as 3.5 times, I think modern IC engines themselves are around 30% efficient, don't know how the conversion from that to suit movement is.)

So assuming the earlier poster of 1.5L of gas was correct, and assuming a modern 15% efficiency, you'd actually need more like 10L of gas to operate for a day, which still doesn't sound like much. That does make their viability outside of a base where they can get resupplied regularly an issue at the moment.

http://www.plasticpals.com/?p=25440

looks more ghostbuster tho, perhaps because of the wardrobe choice of the model.

You forgot the 7% efficiency of humans - the comparison was between straight energy input (but 5 times as much for the suit). That makes the 15% efficiency over twice as good, so you'd only need 0.75L per day to operate it.

I was going to say, is that an unlicensed nuclear accelerator strapped to her back?

Also those 7% are starting from pure glucose. If we look at the efficiency to convertfood into mechanical energy (the equivalent of a car turning gas or diesel into mechanical motion), the final result is even lower...