Robot suit gets global safety certificate

Wow, one can get a suit for less than a gaming computer and multiplies strength by up to a factor of 10. I'd like to see a demonstration of an able bodied person running and jumping. Very powerful applications of this technology can be imagined in the near term!

Oh is that like the exoskeletons for public/medical use? Pretty tight! cant wait till mobile suits come around :P

come on guys, why did you have to call your company "cyberdyne" and start producing robots! It's as if they WANT terminator to happen!

Wow, one can get a suit for less than a gaming computer

Actually, no, the price quoted above is the annual lease for hospitals or welfare centers. The price for commercial use would be much higher. And you can't get to one unless you have a serious injury or work in the facilities.

Also, one can build a good gaming computer for about $1000 and can last for about 5 years.

This is fantastic news!

I would hope that eventually the costs could be covered by medical insurance as well and not just be used for those with the money and resources to afford them.

Cyberdyne producers of the Terminator technology in the movie of the same name....H.A.L the name of the paranoid 2001 space odyssey computer anyone else here making this link?

Wow, that is good news. Respect to this company for helping seriously disabled people.

Great news!!! Soon the obatyans will suit up and combined with a google glass they will be the coolest new nerds!!! But they will still choke on mochi...

Love the Abbey Road pic.

i betcha china will rip-off the patent in a few years and will be producing these things for 20,000 yen a pop.

Its about time. Will this give you superspeed? Where can i buy the stocks?

Where can i get the military grade version? Amuro Ikimasu!

@caribjustice this stuff was probably developed as military appliance in the first case as is a lot of new hi-tek always it would be real sweet to see a trained special ops guy workout in these but i wonder if someone able-bodied as you say would do this and is maybe able to jump five times further or higher if it absorbs the impact from the increased distanced as well. If not it could only be suitable for short time use since it would be very destructive on the joints

I'm sure i'll need these in my old age after dislocating knees several times :(

These names are a bit disturbing i guess. Australia now has SkyNet (which is distributed computing to process radio astronomy data)

I'd like to see somebody dancing Gagdam Style in one of these suits

The military has been playing around with the powered exoskeleton for a while.

Cyberdyne producers of the Terminator technology in the movie of the same name....H.A.L the name of the paranoid 2001 space odyssey computer anyone else here making this link?

Yeha, and if you re-arrange the name "Yoshiyuki Sankai", you get "conspiracy theory nutball".

Great product but I hope they get sued for using obvious movie company and robot names

freaking AWESOME! BIG UPS TO JAPANESE INNOVATION!

One step closer to GUNDAM. Brilliant!

The biggest problem with this gadgetry like anythingelse is the power source. If we are able to develop a high powered compact battery then we will have a real live Gumdam or an Ironman suit.

Cyberdyne, based in Tsukuba, northeast of Tokyo, has so far leased some 330 suits to 150 hospitals, welfare and other facilities in Japan since 2010, at 178,000 yen ($1,950) per suit per year.

330 suits seems like a woefully small number compared to the number of potential users who could benefit from the use of these suits. They need to ramp up production of the suits and bring down the cost.

The company is unrelated to the firm of the same name responsible for the cyborg assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 film The Terminator.

I'm glad this article pointed that out. For a moment I was worried that they were related and that The Terminator was a documentary.

Cyberdyne and HAL are really coincidence? Seems to me the company has used them intentionally and that's kinda cheap.

HAL -coincidentally the name of the evil supercomputer in Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey

HAL wasn't evil, he was unable to deal with the conflicting instructions he was given.

This is a first step forward for Japan, the great robot nation, to send our message to the world about robots of the future

I always though a robot was an autonomous artificial agent, to me these are just power assisted pants, or PAP.

House AtreidesFeb. 28, 2013 - 02:01PM JST 330 suits seems like a woefully small number compared to the number of potential users who could benefit from the use of these suits. They need to ramp up production of the suits and bring down the cost.

It wouldn't make sense to produce masses of them before the full market response has been valued.... my grandmother used to object to using her electric wheel chair because she was suspicious of it and it "went too fast". Old people can be weird about these things.

The Hybrid Assistive Limb, or HAL, is a power-assisted pair of legs

I'm sorry Taro, I'm afraid I can't do that.

All I can think of is Wallace and Grommit's "The Wrong Trousers", lol

It's great to see an advance like this, but for people like me who were brought up with the Cybermen from Doctor Who, the prospect of artificial muscles makes cyborgs less of a fiction and more like a fact. Arms, legs, implants to allow people to see and hear again, artificial hearts... hmmmm

Interesting to note that the headline calls the exo-skeleton a 'suit'... Surprised they never called it a Labour... ("Patlabor" for the non-otaku out there ^_^ )

A good "first step" ,as it were, toward a full powered-armor suit.

”Cyberdyne" - best. name. ever.

Thunderbird2Feb. 28, 2013 - 10:01PM JST

Interesting to note that the headline calls the exo-skeleton a 'suit'.

That's because exoskeleton suits (no hyphen) have been around much longer than Japanese animation about them, and always considered "wearable" rather than "ride-able".

For a much cooler earlier version, check out http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/692178.pdf , they have one from the 60s that made even the HAL look like a cheap toy.

The company is unrelated to the firm of the same name responsible for the cyborg assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 film “The Terminator”.

How funny is it that they felt the need to put this in the article. XD

That is interesting. Cyberdyne was the company that created Skynet. A Series 800 Terminator, which is sent from the future and designed to kill humans, is crushed in one of the hydraulic presses in Cyberdyne's factory. Thus, the company obtains the machine's wreckage, including its CPU chip and an arm. Cyberdyne Systems headquarters applies reverse engineering the Terminator's remains, Cyberdyne reverse engineers its CPU and creates a powerful new microprocessor for weapons systems. Cyberdyne eventually develops Skynet, a network of supercomputers that employ artificial intelligence in order to replace human beings

@Samuraiblue Aside from fuel cells and batteries one of the most promising devices for powering exoskeletons are microturbines which are small palm sized gas turbines run on fossil fuels. A Japanese article I read a while back was considering it for HAL.

I've been following this suit for nearly 5 years now I'm glad it's finally got to this stage and I'm hoping a big company like Mitsubishi (who incidentally were supposed to have built the AMP suits in James Cameron's Avatar) or Honda (who incidentally have a suit of their own) will buy or merge with Cyberdyne and start mass-producing them so I can buy them overseas for my grandmother and aunt who both suffered strokes and no longer have full motor functions. Hopefully this will become the next big Made In Japan product.

how much it costs? i want one.

$1,950 a year Isn't bad. I wonder if something like this could have other applications, like disaster relief, construction or even military applications.