Inventing Iron Man

by E. Paul Zehr

  Figure 8.1. “Jet-Man” Yves Rossy in action. Panel A courtesy Babylon-Freefly and panels B and C courtesy Blaise Chappuis.

  EPZ: What is the most dangerous moment you have experienced in inventing or piloting the fixed wing?

  YR: The most dangerous moment is when I jump out of the plane and deploy my winglet (the foldable parts). I need a few seconds to stabilize my wing. It is the most difficult moment. I had a lot of incidents, but never a real accident. I have never been seriously injured. Because in case there is a problem, I can drop my wing and become a normal parachutist. That’s why I never fly under 800 meters [about 2,600 feet], in order to have enough time to drop my wing and open my parachute. I always have a plan B in case of a problem, and if I am not self-confident, I don’t fly. I don’t want to take any unnecessary risks; I am cautious.

  EPZ: Have you had any crashes?

  YR: I had many failures! I had to drop my wing many times. But I learned a lot from my mistakes and from the bad test flights. Every incident allows me to optimize the wing. I have two parachutes. In case of a problem, I always have a plan. For example, I sometimes lose the control of my wing and there are oscillations. My military experience taught me how to move my arms in order to stop the oscillations. So, I’m ready to face each eventuality.

  EPZ: Do you see the fixed wing as making an important contribution to society? That is, to push the limits of human ability or something else?

  YR: I think it is an important progress, because from the very beginning every man has dreamed to fly. I also think that it is important to put the human back in the center, to refocus on the man, not only on the machine or robots. It’s what I’ve tried to do with my wing, as did the pioneers in aviation, Leo Valentin or Clem Sohn, for example. The only flight instrument I have is a fuel lever and an altimeter, nothing else. I steer myself in the air thanks to the movements of my body: I turn my shoulders right to go right, and so on. Human species have a bigger adaptability than any machine. Machines must be the slaves of the man, and not the contrary!

  EPZ: How much focus and attentional demand does it take and could it ever be maneuverable enough to fly—like Iron Man—as a fighter itself?

  YR: I am more focused when I fly my wing, and I use all my senses. For example, in a commercial airplane, you don’t need the sense of touch or smell. But with my wing, I need to hear the noise of the engines, the hardness of the air on my skin, and so on. In a commercial airplane, you need to be very concentrated only for short periods: the take off, the landing, if there is a storm, and so on. Then you usually fly with the automatic pilot. Flying a fighter plane needs more concentration, because again there is a third dimension (you can fly vertically, which you cannot do with a commercial aircraft). It’s the same with my wing; I can go right, left, down, and up. The biggest differences are the number of senses you use and the time you need to be very concentrated: from a commercial aircraft (only a few senses and not a long time) to a fighter plane and my wing (all the senses and all the time).

  I am now developing a new wing, which will be smaller, more powerful, and easier to handle. So, yes, it will be very maneuverable, ready for acrobatics (looping and so on).

  I know how to react in case of emergency. Not to panic, but to think and react! So it’s very intense, I am very concentrated, but not “stressed.” I need to multitask, because I need to to react and also to anticipate my trajectory. But to engage a dog fight combat is not my aim at all. I don’t want it. I’ve already been contacted by some foreign armies, but I am not interested in adapting my invention to a weapon. I would be very happy to fly with other people, but only to share my passion with them, to play and have fun in the air, not to fight them! I am also thinking to take off from the ground, but this will be for coming years. The only problem is the power; I need to put on engines powerful enough to take off from the ground and then fly. It’s theoretically possible to take off from the ground now, but then I will have no more fuel to fly!

  EPZ: How much training would be needed to use the fixed wing? Would you need full fighter jet training or could someone without flight training being able to use it?

  YR: You have to be a skydiver to be able to fly my wing. If you are a good one, you can learn quickly (a few weeks, full time), because you are already used to steering yourself in the air. I plan to teach people how to fly with my jet-propelled wing but only to experienced skydivers. I don’t think that one day my wing will become a means of transportation. It will probably become an extreme sport, as the hang glider for example.

  EPZ: As an inventor, what do you see as the key parts of your personality that have allowed you to go so far on this project?

  YR: Discipline, perseverance, and above all, passion! I think it is important to try to achieve your dreams. To be able to go back and start from the very beginning when necessary. To keep believing in your projects and in your dream!

  EPZ: Can you estimate the hours of development that the suit has taken so far?

  YR: I worked 15 years on my project, building and testing more than ten different prototypes. I spent a lot of money and all my free time, but it really is worth it! Flying is a great feeling of freedom. The ten first years, I devoted all my free time working on my prototypes. But since 2007, I am on a sabbatical leave, so it’s a full-time project! It really is impossible to count the number of hours.

  EPZ: How many of the advances that were necessary to achieve the fixed wing occurred “accidentally” or by chance? That is, how difficult was it to plan the discoveries and technological uses?

  YR: I work on my wing with this idea: “Learning by doing” (and sometimes crashing!). I always test my prototype, and when there is a failure, I try to fix it and keep working on it until it works. There were no advances that occurred by chance, nothing that happened accidentally in the development of my prototype. It was always the result of discussions, deductions, and tests. I learn a lot of every failure, so I can say that the advances occur thanks to the incidents in flight but not accidentally! I think that it is not difficult to plan the discoveries (it comes from the imagination); the most difficult is to make your invention become a reality and working!

  EPZ: Lastly, Do you have a favorite comic book superhero? Do you know who Iron Man is?

  YR: They are not superheroes, but I appreciate Mowgli and Baloo from The Jungle Book! For sure I know who Iron Man is. In the movie I recently saw, the problem to make it real is always the same—it’s the power. We need to find a clean and powerful fuel, which allows me to fly longer with my jet-propelled wing for example. We have already the technology for becoming flying man or Iron Man. The main obstacle is to find an ecological or clean power—another power than oil. Technology without fuel or energy or power is nothing. We need to look for solutions and work more on the power.

  Underwater Exosuits and Deep Diving Pioneer Phil Nuytten

  Instead of protection from weapons and attacks, the kinds of exoskeletons now available have their origins in protection from harsh environments. Let’s think about the harshest environment on earth—the deep ocean seabed—and the harshest environment not on earth—outer space. Some fascinating advances in hardshell deep sea diving and in spacesuit design are worth exploring. One of the first commercially and readily available exoskeletons was the “Newtsuit” invented by Phil Nuytten of Vancouver, British Columbia. Here we explore how deep-sea suits have gone from simple protection, which a passive suit can provide, to active enhancement of movement with powered segments. We also look at how astronauts use these suits in training in pools and in undersea diving.

  Phil Nuytten has dedicated four decades of his life and founded multiple companies while improving and developing systems that maximize safety for use in undersea environments. He has striven to provide safe diving environments that have allowed access for scientific, military, and sport divers to get to the deepest depths of the oceans. His earliest work in the 1960s and 1970s was focused on the leading edge of diving physiology and on mixed
gas diving. Nuytten began to explore the equipment and instrumentation end of diving quite vigorously in the 1970s. This included specialized life support diving gear for use in extreme conditions of polar diving. In 1979 his research led him to develop specialized diving suits for deep-sea application.

  His first “Newtsuit” was a revolutionary hard diving suit that could be used at depths up to a thousand feet. It provides complete safety and protects from the crushing pressure at depth. It has been described as a “wearable submarine” and is thus clearly relevant to our discussion of Iron Man, the powered exoskeleton. In the late 1990s this was pushed to a just over 610 meters (2,000 feet) rated “Deep Worker 2000” that was contracted by NASA for booster rocket recovery from shuttle missions. He continued his refining work to produce the “Exosuit” in 2000.

  The Exosuit brings us very close to Iron Man in terms of flexibility and function. It is a “swimmable,” ultra lightweight diving suit and a fantastic example of technical progression and invention. There are also plans to utilize a space version of the Exosuit, and astronauts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency are currently being trained as pilots of the DeepWorker Submersibles. This project has implications for preparing astronauts for exploration on Mars or moon missions by training astronauts for work in extreme environments. In fact, Dave Williams, the astronaut we talked about earlier in chapter 6, trained extensively using the Exosuit and Newtsuit as part of his preparations for his Canadian Space Agency and NASA shuttle missions.

  Related to the development of the suits, Nuytten’s team has created a fully articulated, powered hand called the Prehensor. This articulated mechanical hand is meant for application on diving suits and pressurized space suits. Also, and this is shades of the “telepresence unit” Tony Stark developed, Nuytten’s Prehensor can be adapted to remote-controlled interfaces. All of this work and more has strong applications for space exploration and military safety and clearly outlines him with skills as an inventor with relevance to Iron Man. Some of Nuytten’s inventions can be seen in figure 8.2, along with Tony’s version of an underwater suit (which he wore on top of his other armor).

  Figure 8.2. (opposite) Deep water submersible diving suits, including the Exosuit, a swimmable exoskeletal suit including the Prehensor hand (A) and the Newtsuit exoskeleton (B) from the back (note the propellers for movement) and the front (note inventor Phil Nuytten getting ready to test his device in open water). Using a specialized exoskeletal suit (C) in “Deep Trouble” (Iron Man #218, 1987), Tony Stark commented that the conventional armor wasn’t strong enough for application in the sea depths. Note that the Iron Man version of a deep water suit combines elements from the swimmable Exosuit and the Newtsuit. Panels A and B courtesy Phil Nuytten and panel C copyright Marvel Comics.

  Yoshiyuki Sankai and Belief in the Benefit of a Robot Suit

  Based on the current state of the art (of the science!), I suggest (and break down during the course of the book) the whole process of creating and implementing an Iron Man suit—beginning with conceiving of the idea all the way through to development and training—could take at least 40 years. (We will look at what that means for the feasibility of Iron Man in the next chapter.) I have come up with these numbers by looking at related technical developments in neuroprosthetics and robotics. A good example to discuss a bit further is the HAL robot suit created by Cyberdyne Inc. in Japan that we have been talking about throughout the book. This suit has been the lifelong pursuit of Yoshiyuki Sankai at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. In 1968 as a young boy, Sankai read Isaac Asimov’s book I, Robot. This idea of creating a useful robotic device that could be helpful to people captivated him and spurred his interest in electrical engineering. Sankai became even more fascinated in his elementary science classes by experimenting with frogs and how electrical stimulation could make their legs move (think back to our earlier discussion of Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta in chapter 3).

  Throughout his youth, Sankai was fascinated by links between humans and machines and how such links could be used to improve human performance. Over time this became a firm commitment to help people with damage to the nervous system (such as after stroke or spinal cord injury) to become more mobile. He focused on the robot suit concept—not a robot because he rejected the concept of technological dominance implied by that name—and created a prototype in 1997 that could be used to help support the walking of a person inside of essentially what were robotic pants. The control for the motors was triggered by activity in the muscles of the legs during stepping, getting around many of the concerns about putting electrodes or other wires inside the human body. In 2010 the HAL (version 5) suit became available for use in limited applications in various fields such as physical rehabilitation and physical training support, for activities of daily living in people with disabilities or weakness, for assisting in heavy labor support at factories, and for possible rescue support. The current specifications on the HAL V5 suit are shown in table 8.1 and an image of the portion of the HAL suit for the legs is found in figure 8.3. To give some idea of how close (or, actually far away), we are to the Iron Man armor, table 8.1 shows a comparison between the classic red and gold armor (see figure 1.2) and the Hal V5. By the way, it is interesting to notice how the HAL exoskeleton looks similar to the Lokomat we talked about earlier for walking rehabilitation. The huge difference is that the HAL suit multiplies strength and can actually be worn around all over the place. With the Lokomat, you can’t really go anywhere!

  Figure 8.3. The lower limb portion of the hybrid assistive limb (HAL) suit by Cyberdyne Inc. Courtesy Yuichiro C. Katsumoto.

  I had an e-mail exchange with Professor Sankai and asked him about the development of HAL. He feels that his team has passed through many challenges in the development of HAL but they have now arrived at a version of HAL that represents the world’s first cyborg-type robot exoskeleton that integrates the human body with a robot.

  TABLE 8.1. Comparison between the HAL robotic exoskeleton and Iron Man armor

  My discussion with Sankai echoed a fictional conversation in the Iron Man comics about the role for technology in the lives of humans. In the Invincible Iron Man graphic novel Extremis written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Adi Granov from 2007, Tony and Maya Hansen go to speak with their former mentor Sal Kennedy. Sal asks what the point of their work is. Maya says “four years of engineering and I could cure cancer,” while Tony answers that his time is spent thinking of “making a better Iron Man suit.” This causes Sal to further comment “and a suit, Tony. Is that all it can be? She’s working on military apps because that’s how she’s going to get the funding and the space to cure disease. What about you? What’s the Iron Man for, Tony?” This question goes largely unanswered. Later, the Extremis origin story has a reboot with Ho Yinsen as a “medical futurist” whom Tony meets at a technology conference. He tells Yinsen that “the Iron Man program I floated at the conference is not about exoskeletons or war. It’s about becoming better. It’s about bringing on the future. The earliest stages of adapting machine to man and making us great.”

  Sankai believes strongly that the combination of “engineering and medicine is the most meaningful when it helps human beings.” Since he began his journey toward HAL he has wanted to supply leading-edge technology to people to support their normal activities, such as walking, standing up, sitting down, climbing up and down stairs, or doing heavy work. I also asked about what aspects of his personality have helped sustain him in the many years of work on this project. He said he really likes people, and he would like to develop technologies that make people happy. If you are trying to put together an Iron Man timeline, it is important to note that it has taken almost 20 years to go from the concept of HAL to a commercially available mechanized arm and leg robotic suit. The Cyberdyne project started in its infancy in 1991 and has continued to this day. Since there are and have been many developmental versions of HAL (similar to the many versions of Iron Man’s armor), I also asked what the “end point
” was. That is, what would the final version of HAL look like? The objective, he said, is to continue to “develop technologies that will help and make people smile. And we hope to create the future of the new field by developing a new HAL which nobody has ever seen before.”

  Tony Stark, Genius Inventor

  According to Marvel Comics, Anthony Edward “Tony” Stark has a “genius” intellect. He has an advanced degree in electrical engineering. Those are his dry details, but what about what goes on inside the mind of an inventor? In the story “The Confession” collected in the 2007 graphic novel Iron Man: Civil War, Tony reflected that “I’m an inventor. I can envision the future…. I see what we will need and I invent the thing that will help us get there. That’s how I invented my armor. That’s how the Avengers were born. That’s how every idea I’ve ever had in the world has come to be. I invent a solution.”

  How does all that creativity and inspiration work, though? Many people have reflected on this over the years. Dean Simonton came up with some fascinating thoughts on the subject in his book Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science. Simonton examined many aspects of scientific discovery and the scientists behind the discoveries. Creativity is a key ingredient. So is the element of chance discovery. One of the interesting outcomes of this kind of analysis is that it is actually very difficult to specify in advance the discoveries that someone may want. That is, scientific discovery is a creative process and, like anything creative, cannot be fully scripted and demanded. This is sometimes underestimated in science, but it is considered commonplace in the arts. We routinely accept that novelists, painters, and actors need to find their “muse” or need to be inspired and then suddenly produce something genius. Science works in a similar fashion.