Real-Life Iron Man Suit Can Lift 150kg

A home-made exoskeleton – built by an engineering student from Kerala, India, inspired by Iron Man’s metal exterior, and costing only £580 (US$750) to build – is capable of turning its wearer into an Olympic-level weightlifter. The suit, built by Vimal Govind Manikandan, a final year Mechanical Engineering student at Calicut University, is powered by a series of battery-powered hydraulics, weighs 100kg and is capable of lifting up to 150kg.

“[T]he future of this product is mainly in defence, industrial weight lifting, material handling etc,” Vimal Govind told the India Times.

Following the publication of a paper on his exosuit in last month’s International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics, and its subsequent presentation at the American Society of Research’s recent conference on Mechanics and Manufacturing, Manikandan has assembled a team to improve upon his prototype.

“The application of exoskeleton is limitless,” Vimal Govind writes in the paper’s introduction, “but there are many problems to this development and these are finding a suitable power source for exoskeleton, i.e. the existing battery-powered exoskeleton can’t run for long time and there are developments going for engine powered exoskeleton but the space limitation and weight are the major issues in the acceptance of these types.” He managed to overcome these issues, though, working alone and spending only Rs 50,000.