Exoskeletons Walk the Floor at Army’s D.C. Expo [Updated] | Danger Room | Wired.com

Exoskeletons Walk the Floor at Army’s D.C. Expo [Updated] | Danger Room | Wired.com: "“Hey,” an officer asks his friends as they stroll by the men wearing exoskeletons, “you guys like robots?”

It’s a salient question at this year’s Washington, D.C., conference of the Association of the U.S. Army. Standing next to mock-ups of a Javelin missile and a model drone are Russ Angold and Keith Maxwell, who wear 82 pounds’ worth of Lockheed Martin’s revamped experimental exoskeleton, known as the Human Universal Load Carrier, or HULC. Lockheed has a $1.1 million contract with the Army to see if it makes sense to outfit the soldiers of the future with the electrically powered hydraulic suits.

For now, Angold — a co-founder of Berkeley Bionics, which developed the HULC for Lockheed — and Maxwell stroll the floor of the Lockheed pavilion, attracting gawkers who want to see what men wearing backpack-and-leg-brace robosuits under their combat fatigues can do. Angold’s model has a load-bearing bar strapped to the back of his device and looping over his shoulders and neck."