So, exoskeletons are sort of a great unknown right now.
They are primarily confined to research labs or locked behind proprietary doors.
So what we want to do as a student team is open up exoskeletons to a wider audience.
Powered exoskeletons that use lithium batteries and pneumatic artificial muscles could
maximize the performance of a future workforce. An undergraduate team at the
University of Michigan, inspired by building their own Iron Man suit, created
the first collegiate exoskeleton competition.
Four other teams across the country accepted their challenge
What we're interested in is exoskeletons for
search-and-rescue applications specifically for as firefighters because
we believe that if you can get someone into a dangerous situation with more
energy, they can both make better decisions while they're in that
dangerous situation and if they really need to book it, they're going to have
more energy to do so.
This is the first collegiate exoskeleton competition. We know that people are
actually coming, they're gonna bring something and we'd be able to look at
other people's designs. So even if they can't complete the obstacle course
or their exoskeleton breaks or something like that, it's just the fact that we're
getting people interested and that this is actually becoming something bigger.
People are going to be working out any bugs that they have with their exoskeletons.
We just kept running into issue after issue with the electronics
and only got them sorted out at 4:00 in the morning last night.
It was really cool to see all the teams helping each other, I think all of us had so much fun.
I think that has to be there, it's like a humanitarian project so you don't have
that element what are you doing here anyway?
We have a high torque motor on the back
with the cable system routed through the bracket on the hip joint.
It's impressive, it's really impressive. We saw a lot of crazy designs it's a
lot of... I mean good crazy design.
I think someday this could really help do our job safer.
If I could order one of these tomorrow I would because it would help our staff.
For the actual competition part, we're gonna have the obstacle
course including walking across the balance beam,
dragging a humanoid dummy,
and then over what we're calling a quote "Rubble Field".
It's just gonna be like recycled material.
It creates an uneven terrain.
You're gonna have to walk up to the set of steps.
We were supposed to have the motors running at our hip
joints to help us climb up and down the stairs but our control algorithm did not
go that far. I had to use my own force to overcome the weight...quite a challenge.
You know, this is the first one so
if it doesn't work this time we'll do something different next year.
We have tallied up all the scores but first I wanted to thank you all for coming.
This has been awesome, we're really impressed with all the designs you've made.
The winner of the competition is by 0.09 points
I don't know how you guys come to this point probably those
seconds who is running what... (laughs)
Ah, it is Colorado. (applause)
Second place Michigan... University.
I think today went incredibly well and despite
everything going wrong and everything going to pieces as every engineering
project ever has, everything pulled through in the end and we saw really
really great performance out of every exoskeleton.
All we need to do is do it again and again and again.