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Real-Life Iron Man: A Robotic Suit That Magnifies Human Strength
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Real-Life Iron Man: A Robotic Suit That Magnifies Human Strength

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Last Post May 8, 2008 2:29 PM by: John_Toradze
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Apr 30, 2008 3:19 PM
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Real-Life Iron Man: A Robotic Suit That Magnifies Human Strength
mrsqueeky
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Apr 30, 2008 3:19 PM
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    • I wouldn't be surprised if they set up shot in Sunnyvale California.
    Jokunen
    Jokunen
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    Apr 30, 2008 8:58 PM
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    • "is powered by a 100-volt AC battery"
    What is that? Surely it's not Alternating Current for AC.
    Hugh Jones
    Hugh Jones
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    May 1, 2008 1:22 AM
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    • On looking at this guy, I had an amusing thought; how does he answer the "call of nature"? Several visions come to mind, but I'll keep them to myself.
    The Rockman
    The Rockman
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    May 5, 2008 3:01 PM
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    • Robotics have been getting closer to mainstream since the Terminator movies in the mid 80's. I see this as a leap further down the rabbit hole. Excellent article, hopefully they can find a green way to recharge: nanobot solar paint, perhaps?
    John_Toradze
    John_Toradze
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    May 8, 2008 2:29 PM
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    • > Robotics have been getting closer to mainstream since the Terminator movies in the mid 80's. I see this as a leap further down the rabbit hole. Excellent article, hopefully they can find a green way to recharge: nanobot solar paint, perhaps?

    The limit on these kinds of machines has never been the suit or the ideas. It has always been on the power source. Given enough power, I can build you a device that could allow you to put your hand through stone walls. But you would have to replace or recharge that battery pretty fast. How fast?

    Volts x Amps = Watts

    1 horsepower = 746 watts. But a real horse can produce 12 horsepower for short periods, a top racehorse, more.

    An olympic rower at sprint can put out about two horsepower for a minute or so. But most people are doing well to produce half that, and many get tired after walking at 100 watts output for a few hours.

    That gives us the scale of what we are looking at.

    The battery on this suit is supposed to be 100 volts. That's a special purpose battery, and to power this suit it's got to provide enough amps. They claim 5 hours life (depending on power output). Just guessing here, but based on power conversion and what they say about this suit and the bit I know about batteries, it's probably putting out 200 watts, so its a couple of amps. That's about what most people can muster on their own added on top of their own efforts, so they would feel much stronger, but in reality they wouldn't be as strong as a bodybuilder.

    So lets say that battery has 300 watt hours capacity. That means that functionally, the suit is done in an hour of heavy work use. Either swap out the battery pack (like on a Makita drill) or take it off to recharge.

    But let's look at what it would take to recharge it from a solar panel. Solar maximum is about 1 kilowatt per square meter. Figure 5% of that can be recovered if you are doing well. (There are more losses than just photovoltaic conversion losses.) So that's 50 watts per hour. So it would take 6 hours hooked up to a 1 square meter solar panel in good sun to "fill the tank" for another hour in the suit. That's a 9 square foot flat surface turned facing the sun.

    But what would really be interesting would be a mobile suit that gave us strength on the order of 10,000 watts. That would start to get into the realm of doing superhero stunts. Problem is, that if you tied that system to this battery, the battery would have to put out 100 amps. That could happen, but a battery of decent size wouldn't last more than a few minutes at that level of power drain.

    All of the above is why Heinlein's power suits in Starship Troopers were nuclear powered.

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