The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office wants you to rethink underwear - but be revolutionary, not evolutionary. They like saying that before they give all the money to multi-billion dollar companies anyway.
And no nanotech muscle suits that deflect bullets or hydraulic-powered exoskeleton suits or super-strength cyborg penguin suits - as Wired notes, those have all been done.
Instead, they want something that will 'harvest energy'.
From their Solicitation Number: DARPA-BAA-11-72:
The DARPA Warrior Web program, inspired by human physiology and performance, will develop the technologies required to prevent and reduce musculoskeletal injuries caused by dynamic events typically found in the warfighter's environment. This will be accomplished by a system (or web) of structures, in the form of a skin-suit, that are compliant and transparent until injury-causing conditions activate appropriate changes in the web structure. Warrior Web will similarly have the capacity to augment positive work done by the muscles and to reduce the physical burden by leveraging the web-structure to impart appropriate supportive forces where necessary on the human body. Warrior Web is not intended to interfere with current warfighter "soldier systems," but rather to augment them to improve warfighter effectiveness.
DARPA Warrior Web Schedule and Program Plan
· Analysis of injury risk factors and translation to hardware and/or control solutions.
· Systems that mechanically or structurally create functionally neutral, stable positions under typical locomotion.
· Systems that maintain dynamic joint stability in the usual direction (and magnitude) of forces for movement.
· An ability to provide pro-active stimulation of muscles to protect joints and soft tissue. Pro-active stimulation includes concepts to create a force to relieve muscles or to stimulate muscles to contract, haptic indicators, active contractile forces that spare one’s muscles and/or to stiffen joints.
· Systems that enhance joint proprioception to support stable positions.
· Systems that use bio-feedback to enhance motor learning.
· Methodologies for the application of learned positions.
· Dissipation,redirection, and dampening of kinetic input that results from dynamic impact(locomotion, landing, etc.) and from static load carriage. For example, generation of an opposing forceto protect a joint from external forces that exceed its properties and/or limits to support.
If you think you can create a compliant, warfighter-wearable, quasi-passive and adaptive suit system to both reduce injuries and retain optimal warrior performance, get your reply in by Nov 15th, 2011 at 4:00 pm Eastern.
Have more questions? There's a Warrior Web Proposers’ Day Workshop on October 11th in Arlington.
