Cyberdyne Exoskeleton Now For Rent In Japan

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 9 of October , 2008 at 4:20 am

Cyberdyne

The Cyberdyne HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) exoskeleton that we wrote about in April is now for rent in Japan. To recap, the suit has skin sensors to read what muscles you want to move, and then uses electric motors to augment your muscle strength anywhere from 2 to 10 times. The $2200 a month it costs to rent one of these babies is about twice as much as originally estimated, but you know what? If it makes me 10 times stronger than I am now, I’d totally pay it. I’ve always wanted to be able to bench press 350 pounds.

[ Cyberdyne ] VIA [ KurzweilAI ]

Comments (2)

Category: Cybernetics

2 Comments

Comment by Paige

Made Sunday, 7 of June , 2009 at 8:59 pm

The robot suit, HAL, is designed to enhance a humans physical efficeiency by making the person wearing it at least 5x stronger. This technological progression is something I have been ignorant of and I find that these advances are amazing, and I never thought something as helpful as this would have existed at this time. With this new technology, i hope that one day doctors can eventually find a way to reconstruct a damaged nerve impulse of a paralyzed person to eventually make them mobile again if wearing a HAL. As recent studies show (from the video) scientists in Japan are already trying to aid people with disabilities to make them mobile once again. Also, i believe that in the future, mechanism of war will change, because one day countries may be able to provide its soldiers with a bullet proof version of this robo-armor, which would change war on earth forever, essentially making it an “artificially intelligent” war. One man in the video mentioned that AI was impossible to create, which i disagree with because there is proof of Artificial Intelligence already, specifically Kismet, Cog, Leo, and Mertz.

Comment by caitlin

Made Tuesday, 16 of June , 2009 at 3:50 pm

I think the functions of this suit is incredible and the idea of them helping disabled people is a nice thing. However, I don’t think people that have nothing wrong with them should use this suit. We are all capable of doing things on our own and we can build our strength up by working out or doing another activities. The price for this suit is outrageous because people could be doing other things with their money instead of renting a suit to make them stronger. The idea of this suit was a good idea but in my opinion I wouldn’t rent/buy it.

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From the folks who brought you OhGizmo.com, BotJunkie obsessively chronicles Man's inevitable descent into cybernetic slavery.

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