XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

The thought that a person could move big freights without special force, not get tired while running and do many useful things, just putting on a special “suit”, excited minds of many people, inventors and science fiction writers in particular. Exoskeletons were mentioned in various literary works, as well as in science fiction films. But it's all a fiction, a thought. But today's reality says the opposite.

Thanks to modern science and technology, people have overcome their power capabilities. So today there are many examples of different exoskeletons. All of them differ from each other in size, shape and tasks.

What are these devices? Their features are ease and ability to mechanically repeat all human movements. This is quite a significant achievement in modern technology, which is used in various areas such as medicine, military purposes, radiation hazard places, construction and industry.

Wearing an exoskeleton a soldier can carry more weapons; he is largely protected from enemy bullets, becomes faster and more active in his movements. Since the main forces of the suit take over, a person saves more energy and, of course, his health.

Just imagine how useful an exoskeleton is in medicine. This is a great device for people with disabilities who have completely lost faith in the fact that they will be able to walk again, and the paralyzed will be able to move their limbs with the power of thought, being in a special “suit”.

Despite all this, exoskeletons are still developing, require improvement in laboratories and they are very expensive. Let's take a look at the path that exoskeletons have passed since their creation to this day.

The first inventor of an exoskeleton is a Russian mechanic and engineer Nikolai Ferdinandovich Yagn, who lived and worked in the United States. There he patented his miracles, showed them at various exhibitions and on his return home again invented. In the 1890s, he patented a number of technologies that facilitated walking, running and jumping. Yagn planned to continue their development to help the military.

The very first exoskeleton was created in the 1960s by General Electric, which introduced the development of Hardiman costume to the world. This device was a model of a modern exoskeleton that could lift objects weighing up to 110 kg, work in water, land and even in space. But despite of all these high aspirations its development has not been successful because of too heavy construction and slow work.

In the 1970s, Yugoslavian scientist Miomir Vukobratovich created an exoskeleton with a pneumatic drive, which was supposed to help paralyzed people get back on their feet. Russian and European scientists subsequently took as a basis the project of Vukobratovich in the creation of their technologies. So, in the early 1980s, there was an exoskeleton for the disabled from the Central Institute of traumatology and orthopedics named after N. N. Priora.

Lack of energy, slow progress in science and technology, development of materials, and other related problems significantly hampered the development of exoskeletons. And only in the 2000s there were real achievements in this area.

Scientists from the American Agency for scientific and military research DARPA created the project Lady Warrior in 2007. This device was an unarmored and unarmed complete exoskeleton, which was only supposed to strengthen human’s arms and legs.

Later in 2008, the company Cyberdyne introduced the world robotic suit HAL, which was characterized by significant improvements, in particular, light body, built-in computer and work from autonomous batteries, the charge of which was enough for a couple of hours of continuous operation. The main purpose of the exoskeleton was to help disabled and paralyzed people.

Nowadays, the development of exoskeletons is gaining momentum more and more, and companies such as Panasonic, Ekso Bionics, Lockheed Martin, DARPA and others annually present their devices at exhibitions, impressing with increasing productivity and technological innovations.

But unfortunately there are some problems. First, let's talk about the main one faced by the creators of exoskeletons.

If we decompose the exoskeleton into components, we will have: power supply, mechanical skeleton and software. And if the last two items seem to be all clear and there are almost no difficulties, the power supply is a serious problem. Using normal power supply, engineers could not just create an exoskeleton, but also combine it with a spacesuit and a jetpack. In this regard, the developers are trying to find a suitable power source for exoskeletons in the form of a powerful battery or, oddly enough, wireless power transmission.

Regarding this issue I would like to offer the Hendershot generator. The American physicist Lester Hendershot is considered to be the inventor of the device. For the first time his generator was presented to the General public in 1981 in Toronto, where at that time a Congress on the energy of the gravitational field was held. Then it was reported that it works due to the presence of a magnetic field near the Earth. Thus an important role plays its location, as well as the orientation relative to the South and North poles.

There are arguments of its strengths. It doesn’t need fuel. It doesn’t pollute the environment. It doesn’t create noise. It has a significant economic effect. It can work for years without maintenance.

This generator has certain disadvantages. There are distinguish features in its capacity such as lack of complete knowledge about its mechanism; the need for experience in creating quite complex schemes.

In conclusion, I would like to add that having considered the features of exoskeletons we can note that this is a real miracle of technology that turns into reality things that were previously impossible. This is not only a tool for obtaining superpowers, but also the last hope for independent walking for a paralyzed person. In addition, any tasks in industry, construction and even space can also be solved with these technologies.

But on the way to mass introduction into our lives exoskeletons have to overcome a number of problems and difficulties, including the high cost. In the future, these devices will be more accessible to ordinary people and will become commonplace, like computers and mobile phones, providing us with a new technological level of life.

References:

https://studbooks.net/2245877/informatika/istoriya_sozdaniya_ekzoskeleta

http://infocom.uz/2017/02/17/ekzoskelet-proshloe-nastoyashhee-i-budushhee-superkostyumov/

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