Movement Activated Motors

[All Seeing Eye]

Ya know on Iron Man where he wears that mechanical suit, well it got me wondering about Movement Activated Motors.

Is it possible to build a mechanical arm with a motor that activates as you push on it?
So imagine your arm is stretched out and you have the mechanical arm wrapped around it, the motor is motionless but when you go to pull your arm up the pushing upon the motor activates the motor and the motor moves the arm. Obviously there'd be multiple motors for different movements and directions.
These things are possible right?

So why is it so difficult to build an Iron Man type suit? All you surely need is a hollow metal arm with motion sensor/activated motors on the joints.

Surely?

 

[backstept]

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=real-life-iron-man-exoskeleton

 

[Alpha_Geek]

No, it's impossible. Here is proof.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

yes i'm aware of those suits but i'm baffled as to why an actual Iron man style suit cannot be built. A suit that encompasses the entire body and allows full body movement.
If Movement Activated Motors are possible then a full body suit for the armed forces should be possible right now.

 

[backstept]

the problem is with miniaturization of the motors, and making a sufficient power supply small enough to be portable while still providing enough power to the suit

 

[FordSVT]

Yes, it comes back to power requirements and the amount of work motors of a certain size can do.

Just to walk around in a suit the size and weight of the one in Iron Man, let alone catch a car in the air and toss it aside, would require electromagnetic motors much larger than what we could put in a suit like that, and a power source of many megawatts, certainly nothing portable. Currently anyway.

For brute force manipulation of objects in relationship to compact size, hydraulic systems are still much better than electric motors, but they have a different set of problems.