Want to know what it's like for a male protagonist to drive a mechanical armor in a sci-fi movie?
Now for less than 10,000 bucks, you can experience it for yourself!
This is a set of full-body mechanical exoskeleton equipment that engineer Jonathan Tippett spent more than a decade to create, which is an extension of the driver's body and is said to strengthen the strength of humans by 60-100 times. Produced by the American Furrion company, it was named "Prosthesis".
Weighing 3.5 tons and measuring 4.2 metres tall, it is almost silent to drive and can travel at speeds of up to 32 km/h.
It all started with engineer Jonathan Tippett's dream to start a "mecha league" and let the mecha robots play a "hard-to-head" game.
This is jonathan's fantasy scenario, and to develop driving Prosthesis into a "multiplayer sport", more drivers and funding are needed. So they launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, paying $1515 (about 9614 yuan) to go to Vancouver for a Training Course at Prosthesis.
▍ Pure "body" control, true human-machine integration
Prosthesis has no joysticks, no steering wheels, no foot pedals. Through the direct contact feedback of the electro-hydraulics, all its movements are completely dependent on the driver's limbs.
With each step, the huge steel legs are mapped onto the person's arms and legs, and sensors guide the mechanical limbs to follow the movements, either forward or backward.
To reduce the overall weight of the mech, the Prosthesis is also not equipped with any external armor, and you can see directly the cockpit located in the center.
The five-point seat belt "strapped" the driver to the seat, which can slide arms and legs in, hold the controls in your hands to lock and activate the control system, merging itself with the exoskeleton mech.
You think it's going to be billowing smoke and rumbling when it walks?
No, it barely makes a sound when it moves, but it's still majestic and windy:
Feel the destructive power of this guy, the car in front of it as fragile as a toy:
The big trucks were also easily towed away:
Seeing this scene, netizens have said:
▍ A dream that has been brewing for 15 years
Originally conceived in 2006, Prosthesis was inspired by the combination of off-road vehicles, excavators and dinosaurs.
Just like human toddlers, prostheses have to learn to walk before they can run, prosthesis's original prototype was a leg power system that looked a bit silly, and looked like this:
After more than ten years of continuous design improvement, Prosthesis has completed the standard industrial assembly, made of alloys commonly used in aerospace, and adopted electric drives, which can carry out some basic movements.
Prosthesis can now cross obstacles and run for up to an hour when fully charged.
Getting Prosthesis to move wasn't a difficult point, though, as the design team had gotten Prosthesis moving in 48 hours, but it took three years to test.
In order to make Prosthesis a true exoskeleton beast, the perfect integration with people was a big problem encountered by the design team.
With Prosthesis, even seemingly trivial things like squats require a lot of skill, as its movement is not the traditional way of operating a plunger or steering wheel. It doesn't have self-balancing, gyroscopes, ECU controls, or any aided driving gear, and all the movement comes from the driver himself, so each driver requires a lot of practice.
Furrion Exobionics launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for $1,515 (about 9,614 yuan) to attend Prosthesis driving training and live mecha demonstrations.
Their overall goal was $30,000 CAD, and they eventually gained 240 supporters for a total of $43,250.
It seems that the design team is getting closer and closer to their dreams, and maybe in a few years, we can see a "real mecha war" in full swing.
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