Tag Archives: exoskeloton

Building an Iron Man Battle Suit

Io9 has tallied how close we are to the capabilities of the battle suit in “Iron Man,” and how much it would cost to replicate (sort of) such a suit.  Their breakdown:

  • Exoskeleton —  $10 million
  • Head-up display — $54 million
  • Portable power source — $36 million
  • Jet packs — $400,000
  • Wearable computers — $20,000
  • TOTAL: $100 million

They correctly note that this is roughly the cost of an F35 fighter plane.  Given that such a suit has capabilities much greater than such a fighter plane, why aren’t we making them?  Because we can’t.

  • Power: We don’t have anything that can generate anything like the output of Iron Man’s power pack, so the suit would be far weaker than the movie version.
  • Flight: Because of the power problem, a flying suit could not fly long or far.
  • Armor: Today’s exoskeletons are not armored.  Even if we could build a powerful suit, it could not stand up against even small-arms fire, much less cannons and missiles.  And the more we armor present-day exoskeletons, the slower and clumsier they’d be.

On the positive side, we could build a highly capable head-up display for a fraction of $54 million, so the wearer would be able to see which insurgent with a $200 AK-47 knockoff was going to take him down.


The power and armor problems are not insurmountable, but a battle suit that is fast, agile, powerful, and armored still seems to be decades away.


(Image courtesy BobbyProm, Flickr)