Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Powered Exoskeleton Control Systems

With Iron Man 2 only days away, at work we engineers are buzzing with our own belief-sets about the feasibility of technical aspects of the Iron Man movies. For example, most of us agree that Whiplash's ability to cut through cars with electrified whips is "impossible" whereas Iron Man's palm-mounted repulser weaponry is merely "implausible."

One topic about which we cannot build a consensus is the control mechanism by which Iron Man controls his suit. Most of us agree that it is implied in the movies that direct neural interfacing with Tony Stark's brain is the only plausible way that he is controlling the suit, as verbal commands are nearly absent, and since his hands and feet are busy fighting/flying, he must be just "thinking" commands that are somehow picked up by the suit.

Direct thought reading, through EEG or various other technologies remains technology about which I am highly dubious. I have proposed that eye-gaze tracking systems could basically control the suit, given a HUD and various pre-trained protocols.
Reading thoughts though, to me, is unlikely for the following reason: you can't accurately determine what the fish population in a pond if you simply stand at the edge of it and see what swims by.


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3 comments:

Harshad Srinivasan said...

By control, do you mean the control of the various functions of the suit? Such as weapon systems and flight?

Or do you mean control in the sense of what the suit should do in order to amplify Tony Stark's strength?

The latter has been delt with rather extensively in real life - emg, 'get-out-of-the-way' and several other control strategies are exist.

Controlling suit functions on the other hand, seems to be done with a combination of voice commands (the suit has a full fledged AI) and hand gestures.

:D

Anonymous said...

why not to use the incoming muscle electric signals ?

Harshad Srinivasan said...

Thats emg...