Ekso Bionics Holdings Inc (EKSO)

[Rhetorical]

the best and biggest thing I missed researching:

[The goal of Warrior Web Task B, says DARPA, will be to integrate “multiple mature component technologies [from Warrior Web Task A] into a system potentially wearable by 90 percent of the U.S. Army population, both male and female.”]

https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/security/ekso_selected_to_participate_in_warrior_web_task_b/

So Warrior Web task B might be 100 times bigger than TALOS, which I was most excited about. I sort of recognized this as a possibility, but I didn't think it would be released first which I now think is a real possibility.

----

I also figured something out about the transitive weight, so to speak. So I was imagining that the user wouldn't feel any weight, like everyone always says about how exoskeletons work. But that's not actually correct under most circumstances, instead it's just a reduction in weight. Given that this is the case, the user must experience force pushing them upwards from the exoskeleton onto their body!!! The exoskeleton must inject energy and push upwards on the user in order to counter the force of gravity from their load to avoid all the load being dispersed at the feet. So that's why soft exoskeleton suits are necessary. If you push up on the bottom of someones foot, it's actually very hard for them to effectively dissipate the force with the rest of the body. Your legs are meant to carry load one way and not the other way around. So instead imagine pulling every single part of their body upwards all at once instead of pushing up on the feet. That's what a soft exoskeleton allows.

Now I understand why soft exoskeletons are a DARPA problem. Because you want to pull up where there is the most leverage while also being close to the center of gravity. There's an emergent need to transfer the force around the body in sophisticated patterns in a close to skin fashion. I can see the magnitude jump in complexity from simply stilting the weight with a metal shank. The dimentionality and complexity of the problem becomes enormous.

Additionally, I should add that TALOS is not specifically DARPA but D.O.D. whereas the Warrior Web projects are both DARPA. I may have been incorrect or unclear about this in the past.

Here's MAJ Chris Orlowski, Program Manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technologies Office, to explain: