CYBATHLON
continued from page 37
mitted to research, Neuhaus didn’t have
to worry about building a marketable
product. After a careful study of biome-
chanics, he developed an exoskeleton
that added a third actuator on the ankle
joint, which would improve toe liftoff,
a key to the human gait. A prototype
showed promise, but Neuhaus had dif-
ficulty finding a disabled person with
the strength, coordination, and nerve
to successfully pilot the suit.
“We needed a younger individual,
recently disabled, who hadn’t lost too
much muscle tone or bone density,” he
says. “We needed a person with good
athletic skills who wasn’t threatened by
machines and technology. Most of all,
we needed someone who wasn’t afraid.”
Neuhaus asked around the Pensacola-
area rehab community and eventually
contacted the West Florida center. The
staff physical therapist smiled when she
heard Neuhaus’s request. “I’ve got just
your man,” she said.
WE NEED A volunteer to give feedback
on our exoskeleton, Peter Neuhaus said,
and Mark Daniel was sold. It was 2009,
and Daniel was a little naïve about how
quick and easy walking again would
be. “I thought I’d be walking around
the block the next week,” he says. The
first rig had big DC motors and very
basic electronics. Daniel didn’t actu-
ally control anything. The project’s lead
electrical engineer, a guy named Travis
Craig, managed all the controls.
During his early years serving as the
test pilot for the IHMC exoskeleton,
Daniel worked on an on-call, volun-
teer basis. He and Neuhaus formed
an odd couple: the early-middle-aged,
MIT-educated native New Yorker, and
the representative citizen of the grits-
and-four-wheelers Florida Panhandle
(affectionately called the Redneck
Riviera by locals) who was barely out of
his teens. But they quickly formed bonds
of trust and respect.
“The first thing I appreciated about
Mark was his fearlessness,” Neuhaus
says. “And he had the ideal physical
tools and skills, along with a strong work
ethic. I can’t imagine a better pilot.”
As Daniel began to spend more time
at the lab, helping the staff with welding
and other jobs, he evolved into an unof-
ficial spokesman for IHMC and the
exoskeleton, speaking to the media and
making public appearances.
More important, Daniel exhibited an
innate gift for piloting the exoskeleton;
an almost artistic approach to marrying
human with machine.
“I feel comfortable in the suit,” Dan-
iel says. “But it’s also a little weird—like
driving a car with a slack steering
wheel. There’s a lag between thinking
about making a move or step and actu-
ally doing it.” In the suit, Daniel runs
through the countless decisions, big
and small, that make balancing in an
exoskeleton such a challenge. “Mean-
while, I’m thinking ahead, watching the
ground, thinking about how many steps
to those stairs or that door and how am
I going to position myself when I get to
that point. Am I going to turn the exo
three-quarters or halfway? It sounds
complicated, but inside my head it’s all
very seamless and automatic.
“Being in the exo doesn’t give me
any superpowers,” Daniel says. “But it
gives me back some of what I lost.”CYBATHLON 2016 SHAPED up a s t he
ideal place to showcase—and test—the
IHMC exoskeleton, along with Daniel’s
ability to pilot it. Held over two days in
front of a crowded arena and drawing
heavy media coverage, the inaugu-
ral 2016 event attracted 66 teams
from 25 nations. Combining aspects
of a scientific conference, a consumer
electronics show, and an indoor track
meet, Cybathlon functioned as a ren-
dezvous for the world’s leading robotics
research groups.
There was a brain-computer inter-
face competition in which pilots
controlled a character in a virtual run-
ning race. The pilots, all of whom had
complete or severe loss of motor func-
tion from the neck down, jockeyed
devices that enabled them to guide an
avatar using specific patterns of brain
activation. An incorrect brain signal
slowed the avatar-runner. If the com-
puter received the proper brain signal,
the avatar booked.
In the exo race, pilots faced six tasks
in 10 minutes, all of them mimickingreal-life movements. They were required
to stand from a sitting position on a sofa;
to walk up and down a tilted ramp; to
walk up and down a f light of stairs. All
tasks an exoskeleton would be expected
to ace if the technology were supporting
a disabled person in the real world.
“Cybathlon was new for us,” Neu-
haus says. “It was a sporting event, not a
demonstration of a prototype. The goal
was to show your technology and win
your race. But a fallible, unpredictable
human being would be doing the rac-
ing, not an autonomous robot.”
The IHMC suit came together
just eight weeks before the competi-
tion. Team engineers labored through
14-hour days. Neuhaus hired Daniel to
work full-time as a paid staffer, training
for six hours a day in the suit. He aug-
mented his routine with daily 15-mile
workouts in a manually powered wheel-
chair, and hours of swimming.
“We shared what we were doing
open-source, we had a blog, but we had
no idea what other teams were doing,”
Neuhaus says. “We thought the ankle-
joint actuator would give us an edge,
but we weren’t sure. In the end, so much
depended on Mark.”“ZURICH WAS AN amazing experience
right from the jump,” Daniel says. “You
get around most disabled folks, and a
fair percentage have a somewhat pessi-
mistic take on life. But the people doing
Cybathlon didn’t feel sorry for them-
selves, and they were thrilled about the
technolog y that let them compete.”
The team that left a lasting mark on
Daniel, however, was from the Louis
Stokes Cleveland Department of Vet-
erans Affairs Medical Center. Mark
Muhn, a then-59-year-old contractor
from California paralyzed from the
shoulders down in a ski accident, piloted
Team Cleveland’s entry in the func-
tional electrical stimulation cycling
race. In this event, pilots pedaled a
recumbent bike or custom-adapted
trike around a track under their own
power, thanks to electrodes that stim-
ulated their nerves and muscles. The
electronic impulses came out of control
boxes that all but one of the pilots had
taped to their thighs. The exception was82 May/June 2020