Tag Archives: shorts

#435522 Harvard’s Smart Exo-Shorts Talk to the ...

Exosuits don’t generally scream “fashionable” or “svelte.” Take the mind-controlled robotic exoskeleton that allowed a paraplegic man to kick off the World Cup back in 2014. Is it cool? Hell yeah. Is it practical? Not so much.

Yapping about wearability might seem childish when the technology already helps people with impaired mobility move around dexterously. But the lesson of the ill-fated Google Glassholes, which includes an awkward dorky head tilt and an assuming voice command, clearly shows that wearable computer assistants can’t just work technologically—they have to look natural and allow the user to behave like as usual. They have to, in a sense, disappear.

To Dr. Jose Pons at the Legs + Walking Ability Lab in Chicago, exosuits need three main selling points to make it in the real world. One, they have to physically interact with their wearer and seamlessly deliver assistance when needed. Two, they should cognitively interact with the host to guide and control the robot at all times. Finally, they need to feel like a second skin—move with the user without adding too much extra mass or reducing mobility.

This week, a US-Korean collaboration delivered the whole shebang in a Lululemon-style skin-hugging package combined with a retro waist pack. The portable exosuit, weighing only 11 pounds, looks like a pair of spandex shorts but can support the wearer’s hip movement when needed. Unlike their predecessors, the shorts are embedded with sensors that let them know when the wearer is walking versus running by analyzing gait.

Switching between the two movement modes may not seem like much, but what naturally comes to our brains doesn’t translate directly to smart exosuits. “Walking and running have fundamentally different biomechanics, which makes developing devices that assist both gaits challenging,” the team said. Their algorithm, computed in the cloud, allows the wearer to easily switch between both, with the shorts providing appropriate hip support that makes the movement experience seamless.

To Pons, who was not involved in the research but wrote a perspective piece, the study is an exciting step towards future exosuits that will eventually disappear under the skin—that is, implanted neural interfaces to control robotic assistance or activate the user’s own muscles.

“It is realistic to think that we will witness, in the next several years…robust human-robot interfaces to command wearable robotics based on…the neural code of movement in humans,” he said.

A “Smart” Exosuit Hack
There are a few ways you can hack a human body to move with an exosuit. One is using implanted electrodes inside the brain or muscles to decipher movement intent. With heavy practice, a neural implant can help paralyzed people walk again or dexterously move external robotic arms. But because the technique requires surgery, it’s not an immediate sell for people who experience low mobility because of aging or low muscle tone.

The other approach is to look to biophysics. Rather than decoding neural signals that control movement, here the idea is to measure gait and other physical positions in space to decipher intent. As you can probably guess, accurately deciphering user intent isn’t easy, especially when the wearable tries to accommodate multiple gaits. But the gains are many: there’s no surgery involved, and the wearable is low in energy consumption.

Double Trouble
The authors decided to tackle an everyday situation. You’re walking to catch the train to work, realize you’re late, and immediately start sprinting.

That seemingly easy conversion hides a complex switch in biomechanics. When you walk, your legs act like an inverted pendulum that swing towards a dedicated center in a predictable way. When you run, however, the legs move more like a spring-loaded system, and the joints involved in the motion differ from a casual stroll. Engineering an assistive wearable for each is relatively simple; making one for both is exceedingly hard.

Led by Dr. Conor Walsh at Harvard University, the team started with an intuitive idea: assisted walking and running requires specialized “actuation” profiles tailored to both. When the user is moving in a way that doesn’t require assistance, the wearable needs to be out of the way so that it doesn’t restrict mobility. A quick analysis found that assisting hip extension has the largest impact, because it’s important to both gaits and doesn’t add mass to the lower legs.

Building on that insight, the team made a waist belt connected to two thigh wraps, similar to a climbing harness. Two electrical motors embedded inside the device connect the waist belt to other components through a pulley system to help the hip joints move. The whole contraption weighed about 11 lbs and didn’t obstruct natural movement.

Next, the team programmed two separate supporting profiles for walking and running. The goal was to reduce the “metabolic cost” for both movements, so that the wearer expends as little energy as needed. To switch between the two programs, they used a cloud-based classification algorithm to measure changes in energy fluctuation to figure out what mode—running or walking—the user is in.

Smart Booster
Initial trials on treadmills were highly positive. Six male volunteers with similar age and build donned the exosuit and either ran or walked on the treadmill at varying inclines. The algorithm performed perfectly at distinguishing between the two gaits in all conditions, even at steep angles.

An outdoor test with eight volunteers also proved the algorithm nearly perfect. Even on uneven terrain, only two steps out of all test trials were misclassified. In an additional trial on mud or snow, the algorithm performed just as well.

“The system allows the wearer to use their preferred gait for each speed,” the team said.

Software excellence translated to performance. A test found that the exosuit reduced the energy for walking by over nine percent and running by four percent. It may not sound like much, but the range of improvement is meaningful in athletic performance. Putting things into perspective, the team said, the metabolic rate reduction during walking is similar to taking 16 pounds off at the waist.

The Wearable Exosuit Revolution
The study’s lightweight exoshorts are hardly the only players in town. Back in 2017, SRI International’s spin-off, Superflex, engineered an Aura suit to support mobility in the elderly. The Aura used a different mechanism: rather than a pulley system, it incorporated a type of smart material that contracts in a manner similar to human muscles when zapped with electricity.

Embedded with a myriad of sensors for motion, accelerometers and gyroscopes, Aura’s smartness came from mini-computers that measure how fast the wearer is moving and track the user’s posture. The data were integrated and processed locally inside hexagon-shaped computing pods near the thighs and upper back. The pods also acted as the control center for sending electrical zaps to give the wearer a boost when needed.

Around the same time, a collaboration between Harvard’s Wyss Institute and ReWalk Robotics introduced a fabric-based wearable robot to assist a wearer’s legs for balance and movement. Meanwhile, a Swiss team coated normal fabric with electroactive material to weave soft, pliable artificial “muscles” that move with the skin.

Although health support is the current goal, the military is obviously interested in similar technologies to enhance soldiers’ physicality. Superflex’s Aura, for example, was originally inspired by technology born from DARPA’s Warrior Web Program, which aimed to reduce a soldier’s mechanical load.

That said, military gear has had a long history of trickling down to consumer use. Similar to the way camouflage, cargo pants, and GORE-TEX trickled down into the consumer ecosphere, it’s not hard to imagine your local Target eventually stocking intelligent exowear.

Image and Video Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#435505 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...

AUGMENTED REALITY
This Is the Computer You’ll Wear on Your Face in 10 Years
Mark Sullivan | Fast Company
“[Snap’s new Spectacles 3] foreshadow a device that many of us may wear as our primary personal computing device in about 10 years. Based on what I’ve learned by talking AR with technologists in companies big and small, here is what such a device might look like and do.”

ROBOTICS
These Robo-Shorts Are the Precursor to a True Robotic Exoskeleton
Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch
“The whole idea, then, is to leave behind the idea of an exosuit as a big mechanical thing for heavy industry or work, and bring in the idea that one could help an elderly person stand up from a chair, or someone recovering from an accident walk farther without fatigue.”

ENVIRONMENT
Artificial Tree Promises to Suck Up as Much Air Pollution as a Small Forest
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
“The company has developed an artificial tree that it claims is capable of sucking up the equivalent amount of air pollution as 368 living trees. That’s not only a saving on growing time, but also on the space needed to accommodate them.”

FUTURE
The Anthropocene Is a Joke
Peter Brannen | The Atlantic
“Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind’s Losses and the Future of Artificial Intelligence
Gary Marcus | Wired
“Still, the rising magnitude of DeepMind’s losses is worth considering: $154 million in 2016, $341 million in 2017, $572 million in 2018. In my view, there are three central questions: Is DeepMind on the right track scientifically? Are investments of this magnitude sound from Alphabet’s perspective? And how will the losses affect AI in general?”

Image Credit: Tithi Luadthong / Shutterstock.com Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#430667 Welcome to a More Discoverable ...

This week we’ve rolled out our first major round of improvements to Singularity Hub since our ground-up redesign last December. If we did it right, you’ll find that discovering the technological goodies you come here for is much easier, and so too are other Singularity University offerings you might be interested in.
The first and most major change is in the way Hub’s navigation is structured.
The previous categories in our header (Tech, Future, Health, Science) have been replaced by a single page, Topics, which profiles the most popular tech topics across our site. The featured topics in this menu will be updated regularly based on article performance, so you can keep up with what’s trending in AI, biotech, neuroscience, robotics, or whatever is making the biggest splash most recently.
Rolling our hottest topic category tags into one header dropdown allowed us to create greater focus on some of our newest and best offerings.
Our header now prominently features In Focus, which includes articles on how leaders can make the most of today’s accelerating pace of change by learning to think like futurists, innovators, technologists, and humanitarians. We’ve always been technological optimists, and we want to to make it easy for leaders to find the stories that help make hopeful problem-solvers of us all.
We’ve added a section for Experts, which features leaders in the Singularity University community and showcases their thought leadership including interviews and books. In Events, we highlight Singularity University’s global library of local happenings and summits.
Lastly, we’re excited that our growing original video efforts—from our Ray Kurzweil series to our weekly tech news roundup posts—now live under a central Videos section on Hub. This also gives us a place to highlight our favorite video posts from around the web, including the sci-fi shorts we love so much.
Cruising through the rest of Hub, particularly our homepage, you’ll find a much greater variety of content options, including new stories, top stories, event coverage, and videos. In short, it’s everything a homepage should be. On posts, we’ve tried to keep things as clean as possible, and we put a lot of hours into laboriously streamlining our content tagging structure, making it much easier for you to click through category tags into other stories you might like.

Here’s what @singularityhub looked like 2 years ago, 2 weeks ago, & today. Check it out: https://t.co/7cmlTJwc7d pic.twitter.com/jDayIEIFNv
— Singularity Hub (@singularityhub) July 13, 2017

You’ll also see greater visibility into Singularity University events, along with clearer ways to keep up with Hub and SU both, from simple email newsletter signups to callouts for the SingularityU Hub iOS app and events like SU’s Experts on Air series.
We hope you enjoy the ever-evolving, ever-improving Singularity Hub, and we’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to tweet us, and let us know your thoughts. You can also pitch us or email us. And as always, thank you for your support. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots