Cyberdyne, a Japanese venture firm, announced last week that its flagship product, a wearable robotic exoskeleton named HAL, is now available for rental in Japan. The HAL (hybrid assistive limb) system fits over the legs and arms, moves in response to localized brain signals, and can be had for a month for about ¥225,000, or around $2,218. The suits are said to increase the wearer's strength by between two and 10 times, and Cyberdyne has released footage of a partially paralyzed man, wearing a HAL system, who gets up from his chair and walks haltingly across the room.
"Iron Man" comparisons are almost unavoidable here, but Cyberdyne seems less concerned with capturing the billionaire playboy market, and more interested in creating mobility technology for the elderly and injured. (One suspects, though, that Yoshiyuki Sankai, Cyberdyne's chief executive and a University of Tsukuba professor, might not object to the pop-culture reference; his company, after all, shares a name with the cyborg manufacturer from the "Terminator" franchise, and the hybrid assistive limb, while a breakthrough in many ways, is hardly the first automated system to go by HAL.)
The suit, according to Sankai, responds to "faint bio-signals on the surface of the skin" that indicate when the brain is trying to initiate bodily movement. The current full version of the suit weighs about 50 pounds, though the base of the suit touches the floor, distributing the weight more evenly. One student volunteer at the University of Tsukuba, a few years ago, described the experience of walking in an earlier HAL model as like "bouncing on a trampoline."
Cyberdyne intends eventually to release a full-body version of the suit, and to offer it up for sale, not just rental; there are also plans to make HAL technology available in Europe, further down the line.
There seems to be something of a personality cult about Sankai; a page on the Cyberdyne website, titled "Believe in ROBOT SUIT," features a series of photos of him from boyhood on, as well as a Q&A where he makes any number of beatific and haphazardly translated pronouncements ("I will develop technologies that make people smile, and create future world that nobody had seen before").
Yet despite the rhetoric, which can approach the Pentecostal, and the company name, which brings to mind Arnold Schwarzenegger being crushed in a hydraulic press, Cyberdyne's intentions seem genuinely benevolent. The company has already declined a partnership with the American Department of Defense, and Sankai said last week that he would "refuse any possible military use of my robot suits."
One caveat: Sankai's team set out, among other things, to develop an exoskeleton that would assist people in mountain climbing. Ironically, in recent years there have been a number of complaints from longtime hikers in Japan that the mountains are becoming too crowded with dilettantes. One imagines the hardcore outdoor types won't be thrilled about the prospect of robot-men lurching past them on the trails. If you're in Japan, and you feel the need to spend a quarter million yen on a HAL suit, and you take it to the Yatsugatake range, please be considerate of those around you.
