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Fabric Muscles: A Simplified Exosuit Design
Even before Ripley battled the Xenomorph Queen in Aliens, I had fallen in love with the idea of the Exosuit. Whether that suit was in the form of a giant robot in the Robotech/Macross cartoons, or Marvel’s Iron Man, being ablet surpass my own physical possibilities with a machine has always held some appeal. Heck, I have a friend who reminds me almost yearly that I promised to build him an exosuit after seeing Ripley’s Power Loader.
An exosuit has some interesting problems from an engineering standpoint. Let’s start with an “arm”. If you wear an exo suit, and it’s form fitting, it should roughly mimic the body’s structure. So, for an arm piece, we have a shoulder mounting of some sort, a hinge at the elbow, and another forearm piece that extends to the hand. This piece should extend straight, and bend back to the shoulder. Imagine this chassis attached to the outside of your arm. It should also lock at “near closed” and “fully open” so we don’t crush the user’s arm by closing too tightly, and won’t reverse-bend the elbow and break it. We want to protect the human attached to this external machine. Let’s imagine we’ve got a couple bars of metal, with a hinge, and we’ve strapped them to our arm with some velcro-style straps. A couple on the upper arm and a couple on the lower arm. I suppose this could offer us some support, but it isn’t going to help us lift anything.
