Did I mention that I have been becoming a posthumanist recently?
^^ Some of you might have got that already, so here’s another piece of that from the last couple of months.
I mentioned this Robotic Exoskeleton in the foregoing post, so let me tell you some more about it. It is part of a perfomance artwork by Suguru Goto. I was, together with a couple of other persons, involved in the development of the shoulder mechanism. What we did was figuring out how a wearable, computer-controlled mechanism could be achieved that would allow for a human shoulder joint to be externally controlled. We did some research into anatomy, mechanics/mechatronics, did work out some ideas, built some simple prototypes, and finally came up with what we got now. It is quite a simple mechanism consisting of two motors per shoulder. Lots of testing and adjustment followed. Then it had to be integrated with other parts, i.e. elbow-, wrist-, and head control. Suguru came up with a lot of that. Here’s him and the Exoskeleton in an in-between stage:
The performance will be next Monday, a post on this is following soon. Everybody will be invited!