The Tetsujin (Iron Man) competition at RoboNexus takes powerlifting’s “supersuits” to their logical extreme — only the lifters inside these robotic exoskeletons are pencil-necked geeks, and their contraptions generally aren’t as strong as a guy named Magnus. From Ironmen:
Dan Rupert crouches inside a 180-pound frame of chrome-myolybdenum steel alloy like a man wearing the bones of a robot gorilla. Metal bars cantilever over his shoulders and down along his arms, terminating in menacing, knuckle-dragging hooks. At his feet, an industrial screw drive – a machine for turning torque into up-and-down force – hums quietly. Rupert, a high school engineering teacher from San Diego, isn’t trying to look like a supervillain. He is trying to lift a 650-pound barbell in front of a crowd of several hundred people. The exoskeleton — nicknamed Technotrousers — is supposed to make it happen.Rupert stoops and grasps the bar. He begins to straighten, the screw drive hissing. Man and machine together hoist the weight. But something’s wrong. Rupert feels it almost immediately: a slight imbalance, a tiny wobble that his partner, engineer Don Engh, can see from the wings. As Rupert lifts the bar higher, Technotrousers starts to tilt forward. Halfway through the lift, just about every spectator lets out a gasp ? and man and machine together tumble forward into a heap at the foot of the stage. “Even as I was toppling over, I had my hands on the triggers,” Rupert says later, nursing a minor cut on his arm. “We were lifting right up until the end.”