Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

This robotically-stabiilized exoskeleton could give soldiers perfect aim

Drew Prindle
By

the army is developing an arm mounted exoskeleton that helps soldiers aim maxfas
Image used with permission by copyright holder
No matter how well-trained they are, human sharpshooters don’t always have perfect aim. Robots, on the other hand, have impeccable aiming skills — but they lack the intuition, dexterity, and decision-making abilities of their fleshy human counterparts. So how do we reconcile this disparity? Well, how about robotic exoskeletons that give humans ridiculously-steady firearm-handling skills.

Dan Baechle, a mechanical engineer at the US Army Research Laboratory, has developed a new arm-mounted exoskeleton that does just that. The system, dubbed Mobile Arm eXoskeleton for Firearm Aim Stabilization, or MAXFAS, definitely isn’t the first device of its kind, but it’s got a few tricks up its exosleeve that other exoskeletons don’t.

Recommended Videos

Unlike other systems, which can steady a shooter’s arm or hand by restricting movement or degrees of freedom, MAXFAS can actively reduce involuntary tremors while allowing larger voluntary aiming movements. In other words, it allows the wearer to wave their arm around freely, but also provides stability when it comes time to point and pull the trigger.

Related

“Imagine the benefits of using an image stabilizer for a camera when the photographer is capturing action shots,” Baechle said in an interview with the US Department of Defense. “MAXFAS provides that level of stability for your entire arm during the critical moments of aiming and shooting. The MAXFAS exoskeleton senses the tremors in your arm that you probably don’t even realize exist. The control algorithms for the device dramatically reduce the shake without locking your arm in place.”

It’s just a prototype at this point, and still isn’t battlefield-ready quite yet, but MAXFAS is evolving quickly. “Right now, MAXFAS is a developmental test system,” Baechle explains. “Visually, MAXFAS is a large frame with motors on it. The exoskeleton is tied to the motors in a laboratory and tethered to a power supply. The device is not mobile, but the idea is that we could do the basic experiments here at ARL that would allow for a more mature mobile system that soldiers could use routinely to improve their shooting.”

Eventually, the goal is to create a completely untethered MAXFAS unit that could be worn by soldiers on the battlefield, actively improving shooting performance and making missed shots a thing of the past.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Drew Prindle
Drew Prindle
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
Future armies could use teams of drones and robots to storm buildings
Ghost robotics

AI Empowered Robots Perform Indoor Surveillance

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, an Israeli defense firm that dates back to the 1940s, has shown off a new artificial intelligence-powered system that lets drones and robots enter buildings together to scan the insides in order to create maps.

Read more
Holotron is a robotic exosuit that could transform the way we use VR
holotron robot exosuit 1

Life-like VR and Robot Teleoperation - Holotron Demo, 1 min, no narration

There was once a time, in the early 1990s to be precise, when the biggest impediment to achieving high-end virtual reality was the fact that the images were too fuzzy and slow-moving. Today, we’ve moved way beyond these early teething challenges. With impressive visuals and three-dimensional sound, VR has no problem creating a compellingly immersive experience -- from an audio-visual perspective, at least.

Read more
The future of military training? Target practice on running, shrieking robots
Marathon Robotics targets

You don’t have to be a firearms expert to know that the shooting range isn’t a perfect stand-in for what it’s like to be in a real firefight. Unless you happen to find yourself in a shootout with a group of enemy mannequins or two-dimensional cutouts with their vital organs helpfully labeled, shooting ranges are simplified abstractions that don't bear much resemblance to real-life warfare.

But just because the technology hasn’t previously existed doesn’t mean that’s the case any more. Here in 2020, with autonomous robots getting better all the time, a company called Marathon Targets has created a solution. And it’s one the Terminator-style sentient robots, when they finally arrive, probably aren’t going to like.
Transforming the shooting range
“Combat is the worst place to practice a life-or-death skill for the very first time -- especially when those ‘targets’ are shooting real bullets back at you,” Ralph Petroff, president of the North America branch of Marathon Targets, told Digital Trends. “It violates the time-honored principle to always ensure that you have extensively trained critical skills before being sent to combat. Currently, unless they have trained with autonomous robots, shooters are sent into combat without ever having shot at a realistic moving target – a fundamental training deficiency with deadly consequences.”

Read more