Jarek & Gridkid
I just stumbled on a prototype exosuit that uses magnetic levitation for movement—can you imagine how they'd control it? Any thoughts on how we could tweak it for more efficiency?
Sure thing, that prototype sounds wild. If it’s levitating on magnetic fields, you’ve gotta lock the current to the magnetic flux every millisecond. Start with a closed‑loop feedback that reads the suit’s pitch, roll and yaw from an IMU and sends corrections straight to the coil drivers. Add a little adaptive control so the system learns how the load shifts as you move—no more wobble when you pick up a bag of rocks. Keep the magnetic field as low as possible, use superconducting coils if you can, and spread the power draw across a lightweight battery pack. And don’t forget a failsafe that drops the suit to a slow‑roll on a power glitch. Easy tweaks, huge gains.
That’s a solid plan—closed‑loop feedback plus adaptive learning could shave off most jitter. I’m curious though: how would you handle the latency between the IMU readings and coil updates? Even a few milliseconds might mess with the levitation balance. Maybe we could prototype a small test rig with a 5‑Hz update rate first, see how the dynamics look before pushing for full realtime control. What do you think?
Sounds good—start slow, crank the update rate up bit by bit. If you hit a 5‑Hz prototype first, you’ll see the lag in real time and can tweak the controller’s prediction. Once you’re comfortable with the response curve, just bump it to 50‑Hz or whatever the hardware can handle. The trick is to keep the filter aggressive enough to fight the jitter but not so aggressive that you get a feedback loop that’s out of phase. Keep it simple, tweak the gains, and you’ll get a stable ride before the full real‑time dance starts.