A team of engineering students from Penn has won James Dyson’s $45,000 Prize for their Titan Arm:
In its current form, the Titan Arm focuses on one mechanized joint — the elbow — giving the user roughly a 40-pound boost in strength. The team settled on a cable drive system which works similarly to the brakes on a bike. The main advantage was that it let the arm draw from a battery pack that could be worn on the back, thus allowing for the mobility they’d set out to achieve. What’s more is that they did it all with just $2,000 or so in components.
“We loved the way it had been executed,” Sir Dyson himself says of the design. “The previous versions of this thing were mounted on the necks and shoulders, or the lower back, but utilizing the whole back was a great step forward. We liked the fact that they’d actually made it work. And the fact that they know how to make it much cheaper than existing exoskeleton arms is really important. I gather this kind of thing isn’t usually covered by medical insurance.”
“Sir Dyson”
http://xkcd.com/386/
I feel like he should be Equity Lord Dyson.
Stephenson really nailed it with that coinage. Feels old and new in equal measure.
Equity Lords Musk, Thiel, Cook?
Couldn’t hurt.
Old and new — and rather neo-reactionary avant la lettre.