By Andrew Liszewski
Researchers at the Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan have created a bipedal walking exoskeleton robot that’s completely human powered. The rider simply has to shift their weight around to get the thing to locomote, but besides that there’s no other source of propulsion. Oddly enough, another one of the researcher’s goals was to create an exoskeleton that didn’t walk with the awkward gait that’s typical of the ones you see in films like Avatar or The Matrix sequels. And while I guess their creation tends to ‘walk’ more naturally like a human. If you take a gander at the video I’ve embedded below, its movement is just about the most awkward thing I’ve ever seen.
The exoskeleton’s secret is a zig-zag triangular design on the three-dimensional metal pipe frames that make up its feet. Imagine that if instead of being perfectly round, a rubber tire had a triangular faceted pattern on its outer surface. So when you rolled it forward, it would tend to wobble from side to side as it transitioned from triangle to triangle. That’s basically the same idea here. Apparently the design makes for a walking gait that’s very stable, though, remarkably slow and cumbersome. The researchers feel it could assist those who can only walk with a shuffle, letting them move about more freely, or battle a gigantic alien queen in the cargo hold of a spaceship.