Inventing The Soldier Of The Future

The minds at DARPA are creating another batch of sci-fi-worthy tools to fend off most any kind of enemy (and shape up civilian life too)

- Derek Burnett

​​​​​​To get the upper hand in any scenario, the U.S. military has often relied on the most outlandish innovations the mind can conjure. Stealth technology, bionic limbs, and a little thing called the Internet all started with the military— specifically, as brainchildren of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the 60-year-old fount of new technology in soldiering. RD reviewed the next wave of advances, looking for those destined to spread.

1 POWER WALKERS

Spend time speaking with foot soldiers, and you’ll eventually hear about lugging an overstuffed backpack for miles in terrible weather through rough terrain. But the age-old problem of overburdened troops is deadly serious: An army on the move can be dangerously slowed and weakened by strain injuries or just by soldiers struggling under their loads.

So the minds at DARPA threw down this gauntlet to the scientific community: Build some kind of wearable contraption that would help combatants transport their burdens. It needed to be thin and supple enough to fit under battle uniforms and equipment.

To come up with a solution, Ignacio Galiana, PhD, and his researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering immersed themselves in studying a simple act we take for granted: walking. They scrutinized the leg muscles’ perfectly timed bursts of energy to understand how a walker might get a little assist. “What we learned,” says Galiana, “is that small changes in timing—just a few milliseconds—could make a difference between assisting and hindering someone.”