Inventing Iron Man (22 page)

EPZ: Lastly, Do you have a favorite comic book superhero? Do you know who Iron Man is?

YR: They are not superheroes, but I appreciate Mowgli and Baloo from
The Jungle Book
! For sure I know who Iron Man is. In the movie I recently saw, the problem to make it real is always the same—it's the power. We need to find a clean and powerful
fuel, which allows me to fly longer with my jet-propelled wing for example. We have already the technology for becoming flying man or Iron Man. The main obstacle is to find an ecological or clean power—another power than oil. Technology without fuel or energy or power is nothing. We need to look for solutions and work more on the power.

Instead of protection from weapons and attacks, the kinds of exoskeletons now available have their origins in protection from harsh environments. Let's think about the harshest environment on earth—the deep ocean seabed—and the harshest environment not on earth—outer space. Some fascinating advances in hardshell deep sea diving and in spacesuit design are worth exploring. One of the first commercially and readily available exoskeletons was the “Newtsuit” invented by Phil Nuytten of Vancouver, British Columbia. Here we explore how deep-sea suits have gone from simple protection, which a passive suit can provide, to active enhancement of movement with powered segments. We also look at how astronauts use these suits in training in pools and in undersea diving.

Phil Nuytten has dedicated four decades of his life and founded multiple companies while improving and developing systems that maximize safety for use in undersea environments. He has striven to provide safe diving environments that have allowed access for scientific, military, and sport divers to get to the deepest depths of the oceans. His earliest work in the 1960s and 1970s was focused on the leading edge of diving physiology and on mixed gas diving. Nuytten began to explore the equipment and instrumentation end of diving quite vigorously in the 1970s. This included specialized life support diving gear for use in extreme conditions of polar diving. In 1979 his research led him to develop specialized diving suits for deep-sea application.

His first “Newtsuit” was a revolutionary hard diving suit that could be used at depths up to a thousand feet. It provides complete safety and protects from the crushing pressure at depth. It has been described as a “wearable submarine” and is thus clearly relevant to our discussion of Iron Man, the powered exoskeleton. In the late 1990s this was pushed to a just over 610 meters (2,000 feet) rated “Deep
Worker 2000” that was contracted by NASA for booster rocket recovery from shuttle missions. He continued his refining work to produce the “Exosuit” in 2000.

The Exosuit brings us very close to Iron Man in terms of flexibility and function. It is a “swimmable,” ultra lightweight diving suit and a fantastic example of technical progression and invention. There are also plans to utilize a space version of the Exosuit, and astronauts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency are currently being trained as pilots of the DeepWorker Submersibles. This project has implications for preparing astronauts for exploration on Mars or moon missions by training astronauts for work in extreme environments. In fact, Dave Williams, the astronaut we talked about earlier in
chapter 6
, trained extensively using the Exosuit and Newtsuit as part of his preparations for his Canadian Space Agency and NASA shuttle missions.

Related to the development of the suits, Nuytten's team has created a fully articulated, powered hand called the Prehensor. This articulated mechanical hand is meant for application on diving suits and pressurized space suits. Also, and this is shades of the “telepresence unit” Tony Stark developed, Nuytten's Prehensor can be adapted to remote-controlled interfaces. All of this work and more has strong applications for space exploration and military safety and clearly outlines him with skills as an inventor with relevance to Iron Man. Some of Nuytten's inventions can be seen in
figure 8.2
, along with Tony's version of an underwater suit (which he wore on top of his other armor).

Figure 8.2. (
opposite
) Deep water submersible diving suits, including the Exosuit, a swimmable exoskeletal suit including the Prehensor hand (
A
) and the Newtsuit exoskeleton (
B
) from the back (note the propellers for movement) and the front (note inventor Phil Nuytten getting ready to test his device in open water). Using a specialized exoskeletal suit (
C
) in “Deep Trouble” (Iron Man #218, 1987), Tony Stark commented that the conventional armor wasn't strong enough for application in the sea depths. Note that the Iron Man version of a deep water suit combines elements from the swimmable Exosuit and the Newtsuit. Panels A and B courtesy Phil Nuytten and panel C copyright Marvel Comics.

Based on the current state of the art (of the science!), I suggest (and break down during the course of the book) the whole process of creating and implementing an Iron Man suit—beginning with conceiving of the idea all the way through to development and training—could take at least 40 years. (We will look at what that means for the feasibility of Iron Man in the next chapter.) I have come up with these numbers by looking at related technical developments in neuroprosthetics and robotics. A good example to discuss a bit further is the HAL robot suit created by Cyberdyne Inc. in Japan that we have been talking about throughout the book. This suit has been the lifelong pursuit of Yoshiyuki Sankai at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. In 1968 as a young boy, Sankai read Isaac Asimov's book
I, Robot
. This idea of creating a useful robotic device that could be helpful to people captivated him and spurred his interest in electrical engineering. Sankai became even more fascinated in his elementary science classes by experimenting with frogs and how electrical stimulation could make their legs move (think back to our earlier discussion of Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta in
chapter 3
).

Throughout his youth, Sankai was fascinated by links between humans and machines and how such links could be used to improve human performance. Over time this became a firm commitment to help people with damage to the nervous system (such as after stroke or spinal cord injury) to become more mobile. He focused on the robot suit concept—not a robot because he rejected the concept of technological dominance implied by that name—and created a prototype in 1997 that could be used to help support the walking of a person inside of essentially what were robotic pants. The control for the motors was triggered by activity in the muscles of the legs during stepping, getting around many of the concerns about putting electrodes or other wires inside the human body. In 2010 the HAL (version 5) suit became available for use in limited applications in various fields such as physical rehabilitation and physical training support, for activities of daily living in people with disabilities or weakness, for assisting in heavy labor support at factories, and for possible rescue support. The current specifications on the HAL V5 suit are shown in
table 8.1
and an image of the portion of the HAL suit for the legs is found in
figure 8.3
. To give some idea of how close (or, actually far away), we are to the Iron Man armor,
table 8.1
shows a comparison between the classic red and gold armor (see
figure 1.2
) and the Hal V5. By the way, it is interesting to notice how the HAL exoskeleton looks similar to the Lokomat we talked about earlier for walking rehabilitation. The huge difference is that the HAL suit multiplies strength and can actually be worn around all over the place. With the Lokomat, you can't really go anywhere!

Figure 8.3. The lower limb portion of the hybrid assistive limb (HAL) suit by Cyberdyne Inc. Courtesy Yuichiro C. Katsumoto.

I had an e-mail exchange with Professor Sankai and asked him about the development of HAL. He feels that his team has passed
through many challenges in the development of HAL but they have now arrived at a version of HAL that represents the world's first cyborg-type robot exoskeleton that integrates the human body with a robot.

TABLE 8.1. Comparison between the HAL robotic exoskeleton and Iron Man armor

My discussion with Sankai echoed a fictional conversation in the Iron Man comics about the role for technology in the lives of humans. In the Invincible Iron Man graphic novel
Extremis
written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Adi Granov from 2007, Tony and Maya
Hansen go to speak with their former mentor Sal Kennedy. Sal asks what the point of their work is. Maya says “four years of engineering and I could cure cancer,” while Tony answers that his time is spent thinking of “making a better Iron Man suit.” This causes Sal to further comment “and a suit, Tony. Is that all it can be? She's working on military apps because that's how she's going to get the funding and the space to cure disease. What about you? What's the Iron Man
for
, Tony?” This question goes largely unanswered. Later, the Extremis origin story has a reboot with Ho Yinsen as a “medical futurist” whom Tony meets at a technology conference. He tells Yinsen that “the Iron Man program I floated at the conference is not about exoskeletons or war. It's about becoming better. It's about bringing on the future. The earliest stages of adapting machine to man and making us great.”

Sankai believes strongly that the combination of “engineering and medicine is the most meaningful when it helps human beings.” Since he began his journey toward HAL he has wanted to supply leading-edge technology to people to support their normal activities, such as walking, standing up, sitting down, climbing up and down stairs, or doing heavy work. I also asked about what aspects of his personality have helped sustain him in the many years of work on this project. He said he really likes people, and he would like to develop technologies that make people happy. If you are trying to put together an Iron Man timeline, it is important to note that it has taken almost 20 years to go from the concept of HAL to a commercially available mechanized arm and leg robotic suit. The Cyberdyne project started in its infancy in 1991 and has continued to this day. Since there are and have been many developmental versions of HAL (similar to the many versions of Iron Man's armor), I also asked what the “end point” was. That is, what would the final version of HAL look like? The objective, he said, is to continue to “develop technologies that will help and make people smile. And we hope to create the future of the new field by developing a new HAL which nobody has ever seen before.”