Exoskeleton: It Scares The Crap Outta Me

By Rob Boggan

Ever wish you could lift a truck? or how about the ability to lift 200 pounds without even breaking a sweat? Well friends that could be a strong possibility in the very near future. Our US military has been hard at work perfecting the armor of the future for the soldiers of the future. what they have come up with is something almost straight out of the pages of a comic book. Enter the exoskeleton. A super bad-ass piece of external armor that gives the wearer nearly 100 times increase in normal strength, and overall head cracking ability, while maintaining flexibility and agility.

The exoskeleton does all that and more. Giving its host an ungodly amount of strength while being just light weight enough to make simple tasks like dancing, walking up stairs, and standing on your heels look relatively easy. Now this suit isn’t a feather weight by any means, it actually weighs in just over 150 pounds itself, but to be able to have that much weight around you and maintain flexibility is remarkable. The suit, which has been named the XOS, has been in development since late 2007 in a remote lab in Utah. The lead designer is robotics genius Steve Jacobsen and his team of engineers at SARCOS which is a robotics company he started back in 1983.

While there has been several designs for such a suit, the model pictured above is the one nearest to reality. There’s still some research and perfection to be done, but once this suit is completed and battle ready, you have to believe that it would grant a huge advantage for the operator, and create a tremendous change in the way wars are fought. Check out this clip of an early build of the XOS in action.