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iron man

I once broke a toe after my roommate's cat jumped out at me and grappled its claws into my bare legs. It wasn't the initial attack that caused the injury, but the fact that in my startled state I lunged to the side and whacked my foot into a closet door. Now, we could blame this unfortunate toe damage on an overly excitable flight-or-flight instinct, or perhaps even on a domesticated cat's delusional stalking-prey-in-the-Savanna fantasy. But we all know who the real culprit is. Skeletons. They break, they make snapping noises, can often tingle in an oncoming rain storm. Worthless. Thankfully, technology is working on a way to replace nature's lamest structural mistake with a new breed of mechanized exoskeletons.

The past few years have seen various examples of engineers inching us closer to an Iron Man super body reality. Back in September, Utah-based defense contractor Raytheon unveiled its XOS-2 exoskeleton. The "wearable robotics" suit went on to capture the media's fancy and was even named Time magazine's "Most Awesomest" invention of 2010. And it is pretty awesome. According to the manufacturer, the 195-lb suit will make a 200-lb weight feel like 12 and give the wearer the ability to punch through a six-inch wood wall.

Nobody in the world would not want this.

Raytheon hopes to start producing the suit for use in the military in another five years. But before you get carried away with ultimate bionic warrior fantasies, the company sees these suits serving a logistical function as opposed to direct combat.

Here's a video showing the XOS-2 in action (which you should view through the filter of your knowledge that this is a piece of corporate propaganda aimed at getting favorable media attention and securing defense contracts—or feel free to forget all that if you want to live in perpetual "that's so cool, dude" land.)

But aside from feeding the military's need to punch through six-inch wood walls, these robotic threads have a constructive civilian function. Namely in the medical field. Recently, New Zealand-based Rex Bionics sold its first set of custom-fitted bionic legs to a paralyzed man who was able to take his first steps in over three decades. The REX device allows people who have lost the use of their legs to travel freely while upright and, most promising, traverse stairs. A video from the manufacturer:

REX still seems early in its development. It's bulky, slow, anything but inconspicuous, and will set you back around $150,000. But technology like this holds promise for those who have lost the ability to walk on their own power.

Mechanized suits present a twofold engineering problem: 1) designing a practical robotic suit that can accentuate the natural movement of the body, and 2) giving the wearer control over this movement. To this end, the field of "medical robotics" has truly become a multi-disciplinary pursuit. The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) has worked with a multifaceted team to design a pair of bionic human arms that are controlled via noninvasive electrodes on the skin that translate neural transmissions into mechanical actions. The electrodes read the information and feed it into an algorithm which attempts to guess the wearer's intended movements, which makes controlling the exoskeleton feel a lot more intuitive.

As it stands, the UCSC model would be best suited towards those who have diminished capabilities rather than those who have lost the ability to move altogether. One of the major hurdles for engineers will be fine-tuning the connection – or "bio port" – between mind and machine into a seamless system.

So, when will we get our robotic suits?

The military will likely get the first shot at a practical mechanized exoskeleton, but as the tech develops, civilians will start to see these in use in industries where precision placement of heavy objects is necessary. While sci-fi fanboys go to sleep with visions of the Power Loader from Aliens dancing in their heads, the real promise of this tech will be returning bodily control to those with debilitating diseases or injuries.

But of course, if we are ever attacked by giant space bugs or Mickey Rourke with a pair of mechanized tentacles, we may have just the necessary tool to take care of business.