First powered exoskeleton

The first powered full-body exoskeleton was the Hardiman, an experimental 1,500-lb (680-kg) hydraulic lifting system designed and built by General Electric (USA) in partnership with the US Army. The suit was designed to allow its user to lift objects weighing as much as 750 lb (340 kg) and carry them around. Development ran from 1965 to 1971, but was ultimately abandoned while still in the prototype stage due to a number of insurmountable technical problems.

Hardiman was a tremendously ambitious project. Its lead engineer, Ralph Mosher, realised that simply adding power to the movements of a human operator would not be enough to make the system usable. To create something that could serve a practical purpose, it needed to have some form of force-feedback system, allowing the operator to gauge how much force they were applying and how much was needed.

According to Mosher's reports on the project, they did succeed in getting this force-feedback system to work, although the details of how it operated have been lost. However, the complexity of the system – which had 30 powered joints – seems to have ultimately beyond what was possible with 1960s technology.

Although General Electric produced some impressive-looking pictures of a hard-hat wearing operator posing inside the Hardiman exoskeleton, the fully assembled system was never actually powered up with a person inside due to its tendency towards "violent and uncontrollable motion".