Kortex Engineering
Be powerful
Introduction
How much can you lift? How fast can you run? How far can you jump? While our bodies are astonishing machines, it still has its limitations. Despite sharing this world with creatures that can, we ourselves seldom aspire to lift many times our body weight, run at more than 30 miles an hour, or jump many body lengths. We at Kortex Engineering wants to change that. By leveraging modern advancements in neural network based artificial intelligence and low-volume high-power actuator design, we are developing wearables that can enhance the human body’s performance.
The use of wearable robots, often referred to as exoskeletons, is not new. There have been many attempts to develop augmenting exoskeletons that can enhance the wearer’s physical capabilities. On paper, the hardware is sound and can in fact lift hundreds of pounds, jump incredible heights, and hold normally uncomfortable positions for extreme lengths of time. However, they fail to reach us, the users, because they overlook the most important part of an exoskeleton: the human. Because of the lack of consideration for the natural biomechanics of the user, these otherwise impressive suits are extremely uncomfortable, have high injury risk, and have debilitating energy efficiency costing the user more than they benefit, rendering the devices useless.
We recognizes the human factor of an exoskeleton system. Developed at MIT, Kortex Engineering's exoskeleton systems and human robot interfacing devices utilize a proprietary control system that leverages recent advancements and discoveries in neural network-based AI. After a short training session gathering data from sEMG biosensors, each system will be personalized to recognize the user. The resulting motions will be more seamless than ever before, safer than the competition, and energy-efficient to the user. Unlock powerful human performance with Kortex Engineering's revolutionary exoskeletons and HRI devices.
Problem
There are numerous tasks that require the manipulation of large masses in ways simply impossible by a human body. To acheve these tasks, heavy and large machinery, often vehicles, must be utilized. This logistical and financial hurdle limits operational capability, which in turn feeds back as a performance limitation for whatever task at hand. Small, human portable augmentation hardware in the form of exoskeletons are a promising solution to this problem on paper, but their modern forms severely lack in human-machine seamlessness rendering them impractical at best and dangerous at worst. Addressing this gap will exponentially increase operational capability in areas sought out by construction, logistics, transportation, and military sectors.
Opportunity
Our innovation is to utilize nerual-network based machine learning AI to build a custom control algorithm capable of controlling hardware based on a particular user's innate biomechanics, most importantly by predicting their impending motion and getting ahead of it. Using this prediction drastically increases seamlessness, or "fluency" in technical terms, which in turn greatly improves perceived comfort, energy efficiency, and safety. This puts exoskeletons, and other powered wearable robots, as a viable path forward to address the above problems.