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The US Army's Vision of Soldiers in Exoskeletons Lives On
Following decades of failed attempts and dashed dreams, the US Army is once again trying out powered exoskeletons to help soldiers haul munitions and equipment in the field.
In the 1960s, Cornell University engineer Neil Mizen’s “Man Amplifier,” funded by an Office of Naval Research grant, offered service members a patchwork of robotic components intended “to help sailors manhandle torpedoes, bombs, and machinery in the cramped quarters aboard ships and submarines,” as Popular Science described it in a November 1965 issue. Wary of the technological complexity required to develop mechanized armor for infantry troops, the Pentagon has spent the better part of the last two decades, with the exception of SOCOM’s TALOS effort, scaling back its exoskeleton ambitions to better match the original duties of the servo-soldier: hauling munitions and other heavy equipment. The Army’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems strategy released in March 2017, for example, stated that the service would pursue exoskeleton research primarily “to lighten the soldier load in the future” as a near-term priority as the Pentagon began its pivot from counter-insurgency operations in the Middle East to “great power competition” with technologically-advanced “near-peer” adversaries like Russia and China.
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