SARCOS Exoskeleton Video

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I'm pretty sure that $20K was for the HAL-5 exoskeletons


Newscientist Article

HAL 3 weighs 22 kilograms, but the help it gives the user is more than enough to compensate for this. "It's like riding on a robot, rather than wearing one," says Sankai. He adds that HAL 4 will weigh 17 kilograms, and he hopes HAL 5 may be lighter still.

Sankai has had many requests for the devices from people with brain and spinal injuries, so he is planning to extend the suit's applications to include medical rehabilitation. The first commercial suits are likely to cost between 1.5 and 2 million yen ($14,000 to $19,000).

[Falkenhayn]

If it's all about carrying heavy things, wouldn't it be easier to invent something that looks more like an R2 unit, and carries supplies and ammo around?

That's already a concept at DARPA. They call it the Mule, and its a low bodied wheeled chasis with independent suspension and a 200lbs capacity.

[Sea Skimmer]

That figure sounds ridiculously low, especially for anything that might end up being used in the military. We're talking about the same organization which procured $15000 coffee makers.

The other hand they estimated that Land Warrior would cost 120,000 dollars per set, and it ended up being about 15 grand by the time it was ready for production; course then they canceled it anyway because it was fucking stupid. The 7,600 dollar coffee maker was actually the price of the entire galley with fire suppression system as I recall, just as the infamous 640 dollar toilet seat actually turned out to be the entire plastic toilet stall molding of which the seat was a part.

I highly doubt these things will be 20,000 bucks, but the amount of money involved here is relatively small and even a doubling of the price wouldn’t be too bad. The real cost inflation will come when the job of building an armored version is randomly handed over to Lockheed Martin.

That's already a concept at DARPA. They call it the Mule, and its a low bodied wheeled chasis with independent suspension and a 200lbs capacity.

They have parallel projects for walking mules, and a 6x6 wheeled mule which is unsurprisingly the far more advanced of the two. The wheeled one is slated to serve as both a load hauler, and as an armed reconnaissance platform. They’ve already got multiple priorities rolling around to developed the autonomous navigation system. The FCS wankfest plan was to issue one per squad, but since FCS is slowly disintegrating they may end up being less common.

[DavidEC]

$20,000? Isn't that quite paltry considering the cost of both training and equipment for SF operators?

I presume these suits would be as rare as SF soldiers anyway and would be employed as selectively as well.

[Sea Skimmer]

If they get the cost anywhere near 20,000 bucks the suits won’t be rare; after all the best way to get down costs is to have a really big production run all at once. I’d expect the Army will treat them as consumable items to be used until broken or destroyed; they already treat quarter million dollar hummves and million dollar MRAPs that way. Just a tool to be used. I can’t imagine Congress would be unwilling to fund such a shinny new toy for less then a billion dollars; by the time the military propaganda machine is done (with some justification) voting against powered load carrying suits will be worse then voting against body armor or camelbacks.

20,000 bucks is less then the cost of training a solider to be a regular infantryman. US Army special forces training is over 100,000 bucks; and of course comes on top of the price of the training the person underwent earlier in their service career.

[DavidEC]

Do you really think they will become armoured and pushed into combat? I get a mental image of such a suit a) not responding well to battlefield conditions due to the large number of delicate moving parts, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan b) soldiers being restricted in movement and flexibility which is presumably important in MOUT and especially the close personal contact with the locals which the troops seem to have in Iraq and A-stan.

[Admiral Valdemar]

It's early days yet, but there is no reason they can't be fielded on the frontline somewhere. If it adds more speed and agility to an IED disarmer in the open, then that's a good thing. If it's simply a lightly armoured suit for going about MOUT operations for longer durations, it will be used. Combine this with the human augmentation project, and you will give the average grunt something to deal with what we're currently having issues suppressing in Iraq and A-stan without a lot of firepower.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I think a big test of a suit like this is how easily can someone inside it get up from a prone position. Does it suffer from 'turtleback'?