Dan Rupert crouches inside a 180-pound frame of chrome-myolybdenum steel alloy like a man wearing the bones of a robot gorilla. Metal bars cantilever over his shoulders and down along his arms, terminating in menacing, knuckle-dragging hooks. At his feet, an industrial screw drive - a machine for turning torque into up-and-down force - hums quietly. Rupert, a high school engineering teacher from San Diego, isn’t trying to look like a supervillain. He is trying to lift a 650-pound barbell in front of a crowd of several hundred people. The exoskeleton - nicknamed Technotrousers - is supposed to make it happen.
Rupert stoops and grasps the bar. He begins to straighten, the screw drive hissing. Man and machine together hoist the weight. But something’s wrong. Rupert feels it almost immediately: a slight imbalance, a tiny wobble that his partner, engineer Don Engh, can see from the wings. As Rupert lifts the bar higher, Technotrousers starts to tilt forward. Halfway through the lift, just about every spectator lets out a gasp … and man and machine together tumble forward into a heap at the foot of the stage. "Even as I was toppling over, I had my hands on the triggers," Rupert says later, nursing a minor cut on his arm. "We were lifting right up until the end."
In October, in the lower hall of the Santa Clara, California, convention center, Rupert and a dozen other gearheads chased the esteemed science fiction vision of a mechanical suit that augments strength and agility. Such a project goes by many names: battle armor, mecha, mobile suit. And at the robot-industry confab RoboNexus, they were the main event: Tetsujin, the world’s first exoskeleton weight-lifting competition. The name means iron man in Japanese, and it brought out six teams sporting homemade exosuits, attempting to lift Olympic barbells for $25,000 worth of prizes - frequently with inauspicious results.
At the start of competition, the crowd-pleaser was a 1,000-pound behemoth built by Scott and Jascha Little, a father and son from Austin, Texas. The Littles - both over 6’5" - rolled out a classic exoskeleton design. Team Mechanicus, as they called themselves, spent more than $10,000 and took four months to build their machine. Its hydraulically actuated hips, ankles, arms, and knees all moved independently, giving the suit the flexibility of a person - in theory, at least. The Littles hadn’t actually finished the control system in time to test it. "If that thing falls on me, it would almost certainly be fatal," Jascha mused. It took nine guys a full hour just to lug the contraption onto the stage. After a series of limited trial lifts that hinted at scary coordination problems, the Littles decided not to push their luck. The armor was barely more than a museum piece.
That left room for Alex Sulkowski, a credit card consultant from New Canaan, Connecticut, to jump into the lead. He had a more pragmatic strategy. Tetsujin’s scoring formula rewarded not just weight but also the speed and height of the lift, and the mass of the suit and its operator. So Sulkowski bought some steel at Home Depot and built Xela, a fast, tall, and light pneumatic lifter. You could argue that Xela was really more of a homebuilt frontend loader than a posthuman augmentation of muscle power. But that didn’t matter in the glow of the spotlight. In his best lift, Sulkowski hoisted 250 pounds 3 feet off the floor in less than half a second.
Xela’s strategy got the other competitors thinking. Chuck Pitzer, an engineer from El Segundo, California, had been the odds-on favorite before Sulkowski came along; he built his 300-pound, $4,000 Raptor after studying the ur-exoskeleton design: the bipedal forklift from the movie Aliens. Pitzer cannibalized an electrohydraulic pump from his old BattleBot combat droid; the pump feeds fluid to accumulators that shoot sudden bursts of power to cylinders on his suit’s legs. But after Sulkowski’s lift, Pitzer knew he wasn’t within striking distance. He whipped out a Sharpie and started furiously scrawling calculations on the back of a manila envelope - he had a few ideas about how to catch up.
Actually, exoskeleton tech is less about Ripley from Aliens than about real-life battlefields. In 1965, scientists at General Electric experimented with Hardiman, a mechanical suit designed for heavy lifting on aircraft carriers and in nuclear power plants. Its movements and controls were so unpredictable that GE never turned it on with someone inside.
In 2001, Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm, began a $50 million, five-year exoskeleton program. One of the projects it funded was the UC Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton program, or Bleex. The goal: to build waist-down exosuits for soldiers who must carry hundreds of pounds on their backs over long distances. The technical problems are, as the engineers say, nontrivial. How do you make sure mechanical suits will augment their wearer instead of pushing back? Can exoskeletons be small yet tough enough to carry hundreds of pounds in field conditions? The science fiction writers are still way ahead.
Frustration at the pace of development gave rise to Tetsujin. Its creator, Dan Danknick, is the managing editor of Servo - a spinoff of the amateur engineering mag Nuts & Volts. He got his inspiration from watching ESPN’s World’s Strongest Man competition. "I was thinking, Why do I love this show so much? It’s because I could relate to the athletes." And then it hit him: Exoskeleton weight lifting would make great television (and help advance the field, too). Danknick got his magazine to put up the purse and posted a call for entries in early 2004.
The problem was, no one wanted to compete. Danknick solicited the pros first, but even Berkeley professor Homayoon Kazerooni, the head of the Bleex project, disagreed with Danknick’s vision of the technology. Kazerooni had worked on robots before switching fields, and he doesn’t think there will ever be a need for full-body exoskeletons to do the work of a forklift. We have forklifts for that. "Everyone has this dream of a suit of armor. But that’s not feasible," he says. "We have to be more gradual and realistic."
Danknick is a veteran of the robot-competition circuit, international events where amateurs and pros pit their creations against one another: BattleBots, Robot Wars, Monster Garage. So he started hitting up his buddies. When most balked at the deadline and the difficulty, Danknick relaxed his rules: The machines didn’t actually have to walk, and for safety reasons pilots didn’t have to strap themselves in. They could essentially stand next to their exoskeletons and operate them with switches.
That exasperated the purists, of course. Technology’s luminaries were among the spectators at RoboNexus, and a few looked askance at the mechanical mayhem in the corner. "There’s not much difference between these machines and a backhoe," scoffed Will Wright, designer of the Sims games and a robot enthusiast. Another spectator, Google cofounder Larry Page, shrugged and said, "I’m not sure what they think they’re accomplishing."
The cheering audience didn’t seem to care. Pitzer’s scribbled notes suggested a new approach: He’d sacrifice speed and score points with one massive amount of weight. In his final lift of the contest, Raptor attempted to heave 1,050 pounds for first place. With the Olympic-rated weight-lifting bar sagging under its load, Pitzer flicked the switches on his remote control to move the suit’s arms - but the barbell rose only a couple of inches. Raptor froze with an electromechanical groan. Unruffled, Pitzer turned to face his suit and lifted its arms with his own, nudging Raptor’s limbs to full extension. The suit was actually enhancing Pitzer’s strength - or vice versa. Pitzer turned to face the roaring crowd and pumped his fists in triumph - forgetting to turn off Raptor’s hydraulic valves. Behind him, oil flashed off the motors and smoke billowed out.
As all this was going on in the convention center’s lower hall, 65 men and women were flexing pecs and other parts in pursuit of an award for the perfect human physique at the Mr./Ms. America bodybuilding pageant upstairs. Attracted by the tumult, three Mr. America hopefuls sauntered down to see what was happening. The bodybuilders weren’t threatened by their mecha counterparts; in fact, they appreciated the enthusiasm. During a pause in the action, they leaped onstage, whipped off their shirts, and treated the audience to their superhuman, pseudo-tanned bods. Then they helped load weights on the barbells.
Rupert, the high school teacher, was busily tweaking his suit after that first awkward collapse. Having made a quick fix to the footpads so his own weight would prevent the exoskeleton from slipping forward, Rupert again tried to lift the 650 pounds. Again he crashed. "I think you’re nuts," said his partner Engh, who declined to even get in the suit after the first day.
Next, Bryan Hood, a high school junior from Sanford, Florida, took the stage with a simple pneumatic lifter. Exploring the upper lifting capacity of his team’s creation, Hood toppled over, as his grandfather, Paul Lippencott, watched with alarm.
That’s when Steve Judd, a former Microsoft programmer and Tetsujin’s safety coordinator, sidled over to Danknick. "This is a little more exciting than I would like," Judd said. Danknick seemed unfazed. He assured Judd that the safety harness hanging from the flies of the hastily constructed stage had been attached to each exoskeleton during its lift and had prevented anyone from getting seriously hurt. "Some of these guys were led astray by their vision of the future," Danknick said. "This is not about heavy lifting. This is about dexterous, fast control."
When the scores were tabulated, no one could beat Team Xela’s speedy lift. Sulkowski went home with the $16,000 first prize to cover the expenses of his Home Depot contraption and, he said, to help put his two kids through private school. Pitzer took second; Rupert and Engh, Team Technotrousers, took third. The Littles decided to take a vacation from their time-sucking beast.
Next year, Danknick promised, the machines would be more impressive - agile and mobile, maybe able to stack objects and move about the stage. But that won’t be easy, as Sulkowski proved when he insisted on accepting his award in his fully ambulatory exoskeleton. As he plodded to the stage with heavy footsteps, maneuvering the machine with his own strength, his legs tangled in the cables of a television camera. Xela toppled ignominiously. Six guys jumped to his rescue, righting him and his robot armor with nothing but the power of human muscles.
Contributing writer Brad Stone (brad.stone@newsweek.com), Newsweek’s Silicon Valley correspondent, wrote about Linux lawsuits in issue 12.07. 
credit Emily Shur
DAN RUPERT
Team: Technotrousers
The muscle: screw drive
Best lift:
weight: 650 lbs
height: 13.5 in
time: 1.9 sec
credit Emily Shur
CHUCK PITZER
Team: Raptor
The muscle: hydraulics
Best lift:
weight: 650 lbs
height: 4 in
time: 0.2 sec
credit Emily Shur
BRYAN HOOD
Team: Widgets
The muscle: pneumatics & hydraulics
Best lift:
weight: 160 lbs
height: 19 in
time: 2.21 sec
credit Emily Shur
JASCHA LITTLE
Team: Mechanicus
The muscle: digitally controlled hydraulics
Best lift:
weight: 1,050 lbs
height: 8.5 in
time: 1.45 sec
