Titan: Robotic Exoskeleton to Boost your Arm Strength

If you could become super strong, what will you accomplish? University of Pennsylvania students won the James Dyson Award for their Titan Arm, a robotic exoskeleton that increases the wearer’s overall arm strength.


The battery-powered robotic arm is a harness that the wearer straps onto his or her back, augmenting a person's strength by up to 40 pounds. Other technologies are small but expensive because of their special type of transmission called a harmonic drive. Instead, the team's bulk design uses a cable drive to cheaply allow forces to be transmitted from the actuator located on the back.

Far from a commercial product, the team believes that it could one day become a tool for patients rehabbing from back injuries, as well as delivery workers in need of a strength boost. Elizabeth Beattie, Nick McGill, Nick Parrotta and Niko Vladimirov won $45,000 for their invention, which will be used to improve the prototype and secure design patents.

We also recommend watching: "Cyberdyne HAL: Robotic Exoskeleton for Human Rehabilitation" and "Revolutionizing Prosthetics: Mind Controlled Robotic Limbs".

Titan: Robotic Exoskeleton to Boost your Arm Strength 

The James Dyson Award is an international student design award, organised and run by the James Dyson Foundation charitable trust. The contest is open to university level students (or recent graduates) in the fields of product design, industrial design and engineering, who "design something that solves a problem".