Development of bionic ankles at MIT

I was barreling down the court on a 1v1 runout, and the score was tied 10-10, playing to 11. Admittedly, the house rules state that a team must win by two, so it wasn't the most important play of the game -- but I still deemed it sufficiently important to risk injury on what would've been a truly dazzling trip to the "hole". Instead, I planted my inner left foot right on the defender's toe, rolled my ankle with all my might, and crashed to the ground with a flurry of profane objections.

And to think, this all could've been avoided if I had a bionic ankle!

Scientists from MIT filed a United States Patent Application in February for just that: a bionic foot and ankle system.

I wanted to read the whole thing to find the interesting parts from an engineering perspective. However, in a monotonous gauntlet of back-references, subsections, and a shameless abuse of the word "said", the patent attorneys dismantled my mind with boredom, as seems to be their forté. So, instead of including a list of highlights here, I'll just post a link: US Patent Application filing.

If that reading's a bit too dry for you, check out the post at New Scientist Tech.

Engadget commenter 'KYDS3K' probably put it best:

"built-in safety feature that prevents foot rotation beyond a specified angle"

why? that would be AWESOME!!! you could do some amazing kung-fu with a 360-degree rotating foot!!!

I can't help but agree.

Voltage Divided by Current is Futile

Thanks to the robotic exoskeleton project Hybrid Assistive Limb (codenamed HAL-5), we’re all one step closer to The Borg. I, for one, welcome it.

Its name can be taken as a nod to Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000, and its functionality very closely mirrors that of the hybrid suits described some 47 years ago by Heinlein in Starship Troopers:

The inside of the suit is a mass of pressure receptors, hundreds of them. You push with the heel of your hand; the suit feels it, amplifies it, pushes with you to take the pressure off the receptors that gave the order to push.
…
The suit has feedback which causes it to match any motion you make, exactly - but with great force. Controlled force . . . force controlled without your having to think about it.
…
And that is the beauty of a powered suit: you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to drive it, fly it, conn it, operate it; you just wear it and it takes its orders directly from your muscles and does for you what your muscles are trying to do. This leaves you with your whole mind free to handle your weapons and notice what is going on around you . . . which is supremely important to an infantryman who wants to die in bed.

In some ways, the real suit goes a step further than Heinlein’s fictional one. Far beyond the rather crude pressure sensors, the real HAL-5’s system intercepts nerve signals on their way to the muscle, before contributing power generated by servos. However, while Heinlein’s bionic suit allows its fictional users to leap tall buildings in a single bound, the real HAL-5 merely doubles its user’s carrying capacity.

This is more than enough, though, to meet the project’s original goals. According to Prof. Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, they “developed the exo-skeleton type power assist system to realize the walking aid for the gait disorder person.” In a publicity stunt scheduled to take place this week, a climber will use the suit to carry a quadriplegic up the Breithorn.

Credit goes to Bob Hawkins, one of my favorite bloggers, for this
news.