BIONIC ARM = MAXIMUM STRENGTH (Crysis Nanosuit IRL)

Charles: Luckily for us pneumatic artificial muscles have been around for a really long time. James: It looks awesome and it makes me feel like I can lift anything. Hey guys welcome to another episode of Make It Real brought to you by the newly available dot tech domain family, you can now visit us online on our new website HACKSMITH.TECH for more info on our projects, our careers page and more. It's been a whirlwind in the past 5 years I started out making my inventions in a little garage and along the way we've grown this company and we captured the attention of nearly nine million subscribers. It's truly incredible how much this channel has grown. And we're starting to achieve some of my huge pie-in-the-sky goals I thought were nearly impossible. First of all we're a real engineering company now, we've even got the sign out front to prove it. We have this massive facility now, which I think is actually a bit bigger than what the Mythbusters even worked out of. And we have a team of a dozen engineers and video editors, we're able to start taking on bigger projects that most companies would never touch. We don't care if our prototypes aren't commercially viable we invent for the sake of innovation and the inspiration it provides you guys. So on that little note of reflection I thought it'd be cool to revisit one of my old project ideas from nearly six years ago, pneumatic muscles! Gosh I looked young... Anyway I still actually have that prototype it somehow survived two different moves and it's actually a really cool type of actuator I think it's time we finally do a project with these. Luckily Charles is back for another engineering co-op term you might remember him from building our protosaber power pack or more notably his coil gun project. Anyway he's actually messed around with these pneumatic muscles before at school so I've tasked him with building me a prototype Crysis Exoskeleton Arm. In Crysis the Nano suits worn by nomads and his team confer superhuman strength through cry fibril artificial nano-muscles Now since we're not in the far flung future of 2020- Really? Since we're not in a sci-fi universe we're going to need to stick to technology that actually exists, luckily for us pneumatic artificial muscles have been around for a really long time. Hi I'm Dr. Charles McMuscle with Hacksmith labs today I'd like to talk about artificial muscles and how they can help you! Dr. Joseph Laws McKibben was the first man to detonate a nuclear bomb after the war he turned his efforts to more peaceful endeavors in 1952 he devised an ingenious mechanical device to aid his daughter who had been crippled by polio. The construction is simple an inflatable tube is placed within a woven outer shell and capped at one end. When inflated the outward motion of the inner tube forces the woven shell to expand since the fibers of this outer shell are a fixed length the ends will be drawn nearer to one another. Without the sleeve, this happens: Do not try this at home. The human bicep contracts lengthwise when activated due to the shifting of muscle fibrils within the cells the overall volume of the muscle must remain constant so the muscle swells outwards producing the characteristic bulge of a flexed muscle. To curl 50 pounds the bicep must produce approximately 450lbf However the artificial muscles can only produce 200 pounds of force. Natural muscles also exhibit a much larger range of motion. Natural muscles can contract by 40% of their length and extend by 20%. Meanwhile artificial muscles can only contract by up to 25% of their original length. There are many different materials from which these devices can be made for our purposes we will need to perform some experimentation to determine what works best for us. I built this test jig that'll let us figure out how much force we can get out of each of the types of muscle. The muscle is connected to the short end of this lever on the long end of the lever we have a force sensor which is connected to my laptop. when the muscle contracts it will pull down on the short end of the lever pushing up on the force sensor telling the laptop how much force is being produced. Our first muscle is made from 3/8 inch outer diameter polyethylene sleeve. Our second muscle is 1/4 inch polyester sleeving. Muscle number three is 3/8 inch stainless steel braided sleeving. For our fourth muscle we're using one inch stainless steel braided sleeving. Carbon fiber is a serious skin irritant that can give you really really bad slivers if you're not careful so I'm going to be careful and wear gloves. For our final muscle we have braided carbon fiber sleeving one inch in diameter. Our tests show that the one-inch diameter stainless steel and carbon fiber muscles work the best of the whole bunch and while carbon fiber looks very much like the actual nano suits in Crysis we're gonna go with stainless steel instead carbon fiber is actually a little dangerous to work with and I don't want have to wear gloves every time I'm working on this thing. You know we love pushing the limits of technology here on our channel but do you ever have an idea where you go: crap I should have done that years ago? Well now is your chance to be ahead of the curve a great idea deserves a great domain, website and identity and what better way to snag the perfect domain name with .TECH domains you can let the world know you mean business for your next big idea, tons of big brands are already using it like CES Intel and amazing start-ups like aurora.tech, shadow.tech and many more! I know I missed out on the dot-com boom but now we have hacksmith.tech which really encapsulates what we do and suits our brand if you have an idea then today is the time to bring it to life on a .TECH domain just like hundreds of thousands of founders, devs, creators and us who are now using .TECH domains they're becoming increasingly popular so visit go.tech/hacksmith to save 80% off and search to see if a top tech domain of your choice is still available. Thanks to Dr. Charles McMuscle we now have these awesome pneumatic muscles to work with. Muscles on their own aren't very useful though they need to be attached to some sort of skeleton we're going to design the skeleton for our exosuit in SolidWorks. Alright we've got it all designed now we just need to go downstairs and cut it out. To control the exosuit we're gonna need something to drive the valves that power the muscles we could use manually actuated valves but frankly that would kind of suck so instead we're gonna make a printed circuit board that uses a microcontroller to power all of these valves and all the pneumatics. To design the circuit board first I need to draw up the schematic of the board. This is composed of all the wiring and interconnections between all the different parts. Once that's established I can go ahead and start placing all the parts on a board. To see the full complete schematic diagram check out our project on maker.IO We don't actually have the ability to manufacture PCBs in house yet so we're gonna have to send this overseas to get it manufactured could take a few weeks to arrive in the mean time- Well that was fast. These look great but I'm sure you're wondering... Can it run Crysis? No of course it can't run Crysis is just a blank circuit board but we can fix that we can solder on parts and then... it still won't be able to run Crysis because it's just a small microcontroller but it will be able to power our exo-suit. Okay that's one part down just 86 left. While Charles is wiring up the brain I'm gonna do some machining and help him with fabricating the body. Brain's done, body's done, let's put it all together. Here we have laid out on the table all the components for the Crysis exosuit build. Starting over here we have the pneumatic muscles these are stainless steel sleeve each one is capable of contracting with about 200 pounds of force. Over here we have the pneumatic solenoid valves each one is capable of eighteen point seven gallons per minute of flow. We have our custom-built controller board and here we have the frame that everything is going to get attached to, Bogdan? For the frame of the crisis arm we're using mild steel as it's simple and easy to machine we've got the whole thing tig welded together and we're using bushings to simplify the design in order to keep the whole arm comfortable we've 3d printed some bracers that are gonna have steel inlays in order to allow us to lift a lot and still be comfortable. To maximize the flow we can get in and out of these muscles we're using three-eighths inch outer diameter polyurethane tubing. To ensure that we can actually control this thing we're gonna have pressure sensors and a load cell connected to the arm making sure that the computer knows exactly what the arm is doing at all times. And to maintain that Crysis look for our stainless steel actuators we're gonna be wrapping it in wire sleeving to give it a true Cryisis look. Now that we've got all the pieces here we can do our final assembly. Alright, is it done? - It's done! I think it's ready to test. We haven't had an explosion in 12 hours so I think it's good. I gotta say this thing feels awesome, it looks awesome and it makes me feel like I could lift lift anything. It's a really neat sensation actually it's literally like someone slapped a muscle suit on me and now I have these giant carbon-fiber muscles. So let's see what they can do. Test number one... A car tire Pretty awesome. You're not that strong! Lift! Lift! Dammit he did it. Alright Ian's gonna demonstrate how heavy our lead-filled Thor hammer is. He can do it with two arms. Lead-filled Thor's hammer. Charles can you spot me so it's a pure bicep contraption and not my human shoulder. Something broke... - Bogdan! I just want you to admit to the camera that you almost killed your boss. - We tested multiple different scenarios for the best positioning of the shoulder and never settled on one so James decided to test it with this one and the thing that was holding you it's just a small tack, so uhhh... Should've been more specific about the position that he likes. Alright take two, weld hopefully won't break this time. Charles is gonna brace from behind because my mortal shoulders- I'm worthy! As you know in Crysis propane cylinders are a common weapon for you to use and throw your enemies. Let's see if I can pick one up. That's pretty sweet. This just makes you feel so strong. Alright we've got a fully loaded tool chest this probably weighs several hundred pounds let's see if I can pick up one edge. Alright let's see what this arm can really do, hypothetically it can do over a hundred pounds so we've got a hundred pound dumbbell here. The issue is: it's only a hundred pounds of strength in the bicep which means my- the rest of my body needs to be able to balance a hundred pounds and my shoulder needs to hold the arm straight... So, I got Chris my gym buddy he's gonna spot me from behind so my arm doesn't move around and Charles is gonna pass me the weight and be on standby in case I'm an incredible amounts of pain. Take it away it's not working! Let's go straight into the arm wrestle. Alright, you ready for this? I mean his arm is straight, right? So one of the muscles exploded so- luckily the metal sheathing protected me from said explosion but something we didn't really consider was the noise pressure at a location this far from my ear so I still have some ringing in my ear which is fun. We can fix that really easily and uh... Let's try- let's try challenging me VS the arm. Alright, bring me the weight! Alright so there's definitely a few kinks we need to work out with this arm but I was able to curl the weight a whole bunch more using it and it was a lot easier to do so I think the future of augmented strength and bionics is probable and possible. Alright so that was an awesome project but some of it didn't quite work out to plan but engineering is all about R&D and making mistakes and learning from mistakes so let's talk about what did go right. One thing that went very well is that our muscles were actually really affordable compared to commercially available options. One way smaller and with like 1/10 the force would have cost about 200 bucks even used on eBay. One of the other really cool parts about this project was actually the closed loop control circuits that Charles made. Now you see the issue with pneumatics is typically they're on or off, extended or retracted that's because air is compressible so it's very hard to have positional control with pneumatic cylinder unlike hydraulics where you can just close the cylinders and lock the position, so in order to do that for pneumatics you need to vary the pressure and flow to account for the load. And Charles was actually able to do that so we had rudimentary positional control which is actually really cool and we could use it in future exoskeletons and future pneumatic projects. Now as great as that was, Not everything went quite according to plan as you may have noticed it wasn't quite as good at, you know, lifting stuff as we had hoped and that's just a combination of the structure being a bit too clunky and also that you only get so much motion out of these like we said earlier, you can get 40% motion out of a bicep like when I do that on my arm my bicep's moving about that far at the end. But you can only get out of these like two inches roughly and that's just not enough to get the full like straight arm to touching your shoulder motion that you really want for a good bicep curl. And we also had it turned out some reliability issues... The whole point of pneumatic muscles is their flexibility it's the only reason you'd use them over a pneumatic cylinder which has pretty much 90% contraction to extension rates typically. They're much stronger they're much more reliable and for an exoskeleton like this with a rigid frame a normal pneumatic cylinder actually makes a hell of a lot more sense, for pneumatic muscles to really shine you actually want more of a soft exoskeleton where you're not really trying to give the person superhuman strength but just augment their strength or give mobility back to someone who's lost it. One of the other problems that led to a loss of strength was that sometimes things just don't quite work out in the translation from computer-aided design to reality. You might have noticed in the drawings in CAD there was six muscles across the front and across the back and Bogdan and I both looked at the design for like an hour and looked it over very carefully and went yeah we can do this this'll all work fine and then we actually built all the parts cut everything and we're going to assemble it and went: Wait a minute, that muscles inside of James. And so we had to just lop off two of the muscles because we couldn't make it work with those two installed the way they were and because of the time crunch we couldn't go back and redesign the parts. And so that led to us just losing 30 percent of the strength right off the hop. All in all it was a really fun project and a great learning experience for working with pneumatic muscles and I don't think this is the last time you'll see pneumatic muscles on this channel so we might be working on something else in the future. Either way you should make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on any future projects. [YEET]

Channel: Hacksmith Industries

Views: 7,256,529

Rating: 4.8795185 out of 5

Keywords: thehacksmith, hacksmith, crysis, but does it run crysis, crysis remastered, exoskeleton, pneumatic muscles, pneumatic muscle actuator, make it real, exo, elysium exoskeleton, call of duty exoskeleton, hacksmith exoskeleton, exo arm, bionic arm, winter soldier arm, exoskeleton arm, gameplay, crytek, nanosuit, nano suit, nanosuit in real life, iron man, crysis nanosuit, crysis 4, crysis remaster, crysis 2, diy exoskeleton, powered exoskeleton, real exoskeleton, exosuit, crysis 2020

Id: L0esNg2ys_s

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020