Raj Agrawal

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You are here: Home / Archives for exoskeleton

3D-Printing Our World – 3 Amazing Projects For Humanity

September 29, 2012 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

UPCOMING TECHNOLOGY – 3D-printers have become increasingly popular in recent times, especially with recent provisions to enable printing of 3D objects at home. 3D -printing is a revolutionary technology and a type of manufacturing technique that involves building successive layers of 3D objects using certain materials. The beauty of 3D-printing technology is that it easily seeps into any manufacturing domain that is involved in construction of objects, regardless of their physical structure and complexity.

At home, you can now print and use actual and fully functioning items like utensils, crockery, mechanical spare parts and even toys with utmost precision of design. At the industrial end, 3D-printers have been used to build fully functioning parts for air-planes, cars and even complex furniture! This is just a tiny gist of how powerful and useful 3D-printing technology is to mankind. I’ll now talk about a few projects aimed to solve some of the most complicated problems in the history of mankind; all with the help of 3D-printers!

Automating the production of habitable houses

Among the many disparities, our civilisation continues to face a state of uneven distribution of rights, like shelter for instance. The lack of adequate shelter is largely witnessed in 3rd world countries and there’s inadequacy with the conventional methods of building residential houses, which commonly arises a number of risky and unlawful problems.

Due to incessant rise in population, especially in urban areas of the world, the number of slum dwellers is rising. One billion people worldwide live in slums and the figure is projected to grow to 2 billion by 2030 – An excerpt from Wikipedia; statistics forecasted by United Nations.

But, there’s good news. A project is under cooks that is focused at eradicating all the negative outcomes of constructing houses – the project is called CRAFT – Centre for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies. It is aimed at scaling the 3D-printing method to a level of automatically building a much stronger, completely habitable house within 20 hours and at the cheapest costs of production. And guess what, apart from it being an automated process, it’s also environmental friendly and capable of building exotic structures at no additional costs of production!


 Printing precise exoskeletons to overcome certain physical disabilities

For years, the concept of a wearable exoskeleton for humans has been associated with cyborg-like suits that amplify human strength, typically intended for military purposes. They’ll take time to be perfected. But now, wearable exoskeletons are gradually working with smarter prosthetics for certain disabilities in people. The exoskeletons have been usually intended for adults and conforming to their physical size. One exceptional case of a 2 year old disabled child invited the need for an alternative way to build an exoskeleton for children.

This is very indicative that we’ll see more developments in coming years in the field of smart prosthetic. The video briefly explains how a child suffering from a permanent disability called arthrogryposis, was only able to use an exoskeleton because of 3D-printing technology.


3D-printed blood vessels are now a reality

Yes, you read it right. It is now possible to generate/ build functioning blood vessels. A news report talks about a new process called Dynamic Optical Projection Stereo-lithography, or DOPsL, that promises printing of blood vessels in mere seconds. Read more about 3D-printed blood vessels using DOPsL at Neatorama. This being done, we could soon print all parts of a human body. However and whenever it happens, growing human limbs and organs would be outstanding. While 3D-printed human kidneys and potentially other organs are under development, they could take some time to materialise as an available solution.

The video explains and demonstrates the 3D-printing process of blood vessels with sugar – A technique that was much in news before DOPsL.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: exoskeleton

eLEGS – An Exoskeleton That Helps The Paraplegic Walk Upright

July 24, 2012 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Ekso Bionics, formerly Berkeley Bionics are now selling eLEGS; an artificially intelligent exoskeleton that aids people with extremely weakened lower bodies. When worn, this battery powered exoskeleton – equipped with sensors and motion detectors – observes the user’s gestures and acts accordingly. In nature, one of the main functions of exoskeletons are to externally support the body – a common phenomenon in several species of animals. In the artificial world of technology, exoskeletons have an history of granting users with super-human-like capabilities. eLEGS as exoskeleton, aims at helping people with walking disabilities experience the basic human capabilities.

ekso
eLEGS, the product

Via [Fastcompany.com]

Filed Under: Consumer Technology Tagged With: exoskeleton

Unveiling XOS 2 Exoskeleton – The Iron Man Suit

October 10, 2010 by Raj Agrawal 2 Comments

Raytheon’s new improved 2nd generation Exoskeleton Robotic Suit is more stronger, lighter and consumes much lesser power.

If you’ve read the Iron Man comics or seen it’s movies, you might have wondered how would it be when it becomes a reality. A total war machine set to save the earth and yada yada. Such suit or at least a ‘resemblance’ is already being attempted and worked on since quite some time. One of the developers, ‘Raytheon’ have built a similar suit and has recently unveiled the new version – XOS 2 Exoskeleton. A suit giving the user “Super Human Capabilities”.

The suit is built from a combination of structures, sensors, actuators and controllers, and it is powered by high pressure hydraulics – Raytheon.com

raytheon xos2 exosleletion
The XOS 2 Exoskeleton Suit
  • The Selling Point –

Now it’s not exactly what the fictional Iron Man suit does or what your hyper fantasies demand, but it’s more intended towards dealing with the logistics challenges the military faces in and out of the theater. This new version of the suit is more lighter, consumes 50% lesser power than it’s predecessor and is more resistant to the environment. The XOS 2 is intended to help the military personal with easing repetitive lifting of heavy goods, working faster and performing the work of two or there men thus saving time, energy and helping to implement better strategies.

Filed Under: Consumer Technology Tagged With: exoskeleton