Haptic powered exoskeleton VR interface

Heh, I forgot I was registered on this forum, thanks for the password reset request, admin.

I am a bit of an extremist in the VR simulator space. For the last 15 years or so I have been talking a lot publicly about my interest in making a full-body and fully-immersive VR simulator.

Generally it's like an Iron Man suit but it works in reverse. Rather than boosting your strength, it repels you. Normally the suit moves freely and is self-supporting like you're not even wearing it.

But if you are standing next to a virtual simulated wall and you reach out to touch it, and suddenly the exoskeleton limbs lock up and won't allow you to push your hand "into" the virtual wall. The harder you push, the harder the suit limbs push back on you.

The powered exoskeleton is attached to a full-motion X-Y-Z motion gantry, and mounted on a full rotation 360-degree pitch/yaw/roll gimbal system. It allows you to "walk" across a simulated virtual ground, and "trip" over virtual rocks and logs in your way.

When you fall over on your face, the gimbal suddenly forcefully rotates you face down, and the exoskeleton limbs and the X-Y-Z motion platform jerks upward as you slam into the virtual ground. After the impact the motion platform slowly drifts back to the center position below your level of motion perception.

This powered exoskeleton motion system can be sufficiently sophisticated to allow you sit on virtual seats inside a virtual cockpit or cabin of an airplane, tank, car, semi-tractor, etc and reach out and operate virtual hand controls like steering wheels, levers, buttons, and foot pedals that don't exist.

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Really, I could imagine the militaries of the world loving something like this. No need to train new cadets in a real tank or airplane, just put them in a VR exoskeleton and train them on a virtual battlefield firing virtual tank shells or artillery that slams them back into the virtual ground, before moving them up to the real thing.

At which point the new soldiers are already familiar with what to do and so the actual costs of fuel, munitions, maintenance, and so forth for training purposes are all hugely reduced, saved for the people who already have a basic level of training.

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Building the first powered exoskeleton is half the battle. It's not just one powered exoskeleton, because people are different physical sizes. Limbs are different lengths and the musculature and body fat is different from one person to the next.

Iron Man only had to build his exoskeleton suit to fit him. He didn't have to deal with the entire range of sizes across the human population also using his exoskeleton.

Either the one exoskeleton device must have a way to adapt to people of hugely different body sizes, or there needs to be a way to have a collection of differently sized exoskeletons that can be quickly and easily swapped in and out of the support and rotation gantry, while still maintaining precision of motion and force feedback.

If you've read the Wikipedia article on powered exoskeletons, yes I have contributed a lot to that...

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However I have come to accept the fact that as a lower middle class American with about a $50k income, there is just no way I can even begin to attempt to do much of anything on my own. Many engineering part supply places won't even talk to me, I'm not worth their time.

Just starting out is ridiculous. I merely need a full-body powered exoskeleton with about 60 actuators for full skeletal motion. I keep searching for one on Amazon but I haven't found any for sale yet... lol

At least my powered exoskeleton will always be tethered so I don't need to make it fully self-powered and with tiny force-feedback actuators fully onboard the skeleton.

Really good precise actuators are sooo damn expensive. Hydraulics requires proportioning valves that can rapidly, precisely, and repeatably open and close on command, and official ones cost around US$500 each. The really good electrohydraulic proportioning servovalves have US Military ITAR restrictions because they are used to control airfoil surfaces on ballistic missiles.

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Patenting for me is the big Achilles heel for doing much of anything. I am well aware it is very expensive to patent and then defend anything, and for what I am doing it is so "out there" that profiting from it is basically impossible.

For a while I have been contemplating saying just f*** the whole patent system and open source it completely on the Open Source Hardware Association ( www.oshwa.org ) because I pretty much know I will never make a dime from any of this.

- Dale Mahalko, dmahalko@gmail.com