Vimal Govind Manikandan, a final year student of mechanical Engineering from Calicut University in Kerala, who is fond of the Hollywood movies such a “Avatar” and “Iron Man” wanted to make one for himslef and set his mission into reality with his engineering knowledge. The “no ordinary” costume is functional and will surely give one a feeling of being an Ironman. But apparently for many this remains a dream. Instead of just imagining about the suit, Vimal chose to develop one for himself. As the men of the hour says “even though the suit can not fly and has some difficulty in walking but that does not diminish the positive qualities”. Also, since it is powered by batteries, the chance that it lasts long is unlikely.
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Speaking about his innovation, Manikandan told a leading daily, “Actually the future of this product is mainly in defence, industrial weight lifting, material handling etc”. He wants to make it useful in terms of making it easier for individual soldiers to lift very heavy objects. The only negative point is due to exoskeleton; it becomes quite hard to run and walk in this robot suit.
The exoskeleton weighs 220 pounds, can lift 330 pounds (it’s not clear if that includes the exoskeleton and human inside). His team built their first prototype back in 2015, which was much larger but mechanically-powered.
Out of the 13 countries that presented, Manikandan’s paper was selected as the best and will be published in the International Journal of Mechanical and Robotics Research soon.
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Currently, the team is working on improving the prototype so that they can fix the walking ability of the robot.
