[University of Utah robotics expert Stephen] Jacobsen says, "before you do it right, you have to do it at all."
The first step in designing the exoskeleton, he explains, was building this plastic mock-up of the device that designers could use to gather data about how the human body moves.
...to see how various designs will work, it helps to build physical models too. In an equipment room down the hall, designer Jon Price positions a miniature wooden model of the exoskeleton next to a quarter-scale clay sculpture of a person. This setup, he says, allows researchers to see whether the machinery around a joint will bump into itself, for instance. "You build and you analyze, hand in hand," says Jacobsen. And it's a lot easier to make changes to the design at this scale.
Gregory T. Huang, "Demo: Wearable Robots," Technology Review, July/August 2004 (subscription required)
