The biohack.me forums were originally run on Vanilla and ran from January 2011 to July 2024. They are preserved here as a read-only archive. If you had an account on the forums and are in the archive and wish to have either your posts anonymized or removed entirely, email us and let us know.
While we are no longer running Vanilla, Patreon badges are still being awarded, and shoutout forum posts are being created, because this is done directly in the database via an automated task.
Mechanical Mobility Augmentaion Wearable?
Human mobility is awful in terms of top speed and biomechanical efficiency since a bicycle is capable of making a human go 4x as fast with the same power input, however a bicycle doesnt allow for wall-running or jumping or other parkour techniques, restricting us to a horizontal plane.
I tried walking in different ways, engaging different muscles and across different surfaces noting that some were much more tiring.
this is enough evidence to tell that a passive device that among other things would increase the elasticity of momentum transfer & that occurs with each step in order to increase the power of the reaction force that pushes the body forward & optimize the angle at which the transfer happens, this would effectively be a spring complex that attaches to the body, which would also act as an impulse dampener, maximizing the drop a human could take and augmenting vertical mobility.
however there are many more complexities to creating such a device which i'm unaware of and i'm also sure this post is poorly formatted as takes me this long to get to the question.
what would be the various complexities one would have to overcome when designing such a device?
I assume it would work similar to ones in sci-fi movement shooters like Titanfall, however I might be completely wrong as my understanding of physics is limited. as ar as i know a device capable of similar feats might have to be passive and incorporate pistons which expand with explosions of fuel/gas mixture or some other powerful source of linear mechanical energy.
Comments
-
There are soft exo-skeleton you can look into. Or you can go the prosthetic way, but they are still to slow to work decently. There are same soft exo design for old people rather than military use.
The biggest obstacle to soft exo are the high cost and almost impossible to mas produce. There are also no good ways to have them attach to the body and stay in place without pulling or scratching the user. Or you will be force to have it on top of your cloth.
Fan fact is easer to build your own exo for your self than buy one.
-
I think that passive exoskeletons have the most potential right now:
the human body's biomechanical efficiency is constrained by biology, however it can be augmented simply by use of spring tension and other mechanical properties of synthetic materials.
e.g: a spring tensioned retracting cable can be attached at the shoulder and body of a heavy rifle in order to passively resist some of the weight, shifting force from the triceps, deltoids and forearm muscles, reducing tremors and thus increasing shot accuracy. This is the same problem that had the hilariously sub-optimal solution of attaching a heavy robotic third arm to aid the soldier in aiming his rifle. -
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6514471/
I wonder if there's a biological approach to massively increase the density of elastic fibers.
