Exosapien Technologies
Jonathan Tippett spent much of his childhood playtime sculpting dinosaurs out of modeling clay and building spaceships with LEGO.
The child has long-since grown, but Tippett’s passions for the Mesozoic Era and the Space Age have never waned. Nor has his interest in human-machine interaction.
“As a small boy, I lived for LEGO!” says Tippett, who lists excavators, dune buggies and dinosaurs as three of his favorite things.
“I always made machines, never buildings. It was spaceships, trucks and eventually mechs (large combat vehicles piloted by a human from a cockpit). In my latter LEGO years, I built a mechanized two-legged mech inspired by my favorite dinosaur, the T-Rex.”
From LEGO, Tippett moved on to a new obsession – remote controlled cars, specifically 1:10 scale electric R/C off-road racing buggies. With money saved from his paper route, he purchased the popular RC10 car which he fanatically tuned and tweaked.
“I eventually designed and built a four-wheel steering system using only handmade parts – there was no 3D printing in the 1980s,” he recalls.
“I even made my own set of one-piece aluminum wheels for it in the high school machine shop which I was allowed to use during my free time after ingratiating myself to the auto mechanics teacher by offering to get the old milling machine working in exchange for extra shop access.”
Today, the South Africa-born, Canada-raised engineer, artist and entrepreneur is a driving force behind emerging large-scale exoskeletal technology. Tippett is the founder and CEO of Exosapien Technologies, a Vancouver-based company that develops giant, all-terrain, powered exoskeletons. He also serves as Exosapien’s lead test pilot.
INSPIRATION
Shaped by his childhood interests, Tippett found his definitive inspiration at Burning Man, a week-long, large-scale cultural movement and annual gathering of creativity, innovation and connection. The event, which attracted 74,000 people in 2023, is held in the remote Black Rock desert in northern Nevada.
Tippett’s eureka moment came at the 2003 edition of Burning Man, when he laid eyes on a giant set of mechanical dinosaur legs.
“It was a static sculpture, cut off at the waist and I thought ‘how cool would it be to sit up there and operate those legs, using my own legs to control them?’,” he says.
“As a recently-minted mechanical engineer and inspired by the mega-art all around me, I then resolved to make such a machine so I could have that experience myself.
“And thus was planted the seed that grew into a quest to create the world’s first, fully operational, agile, giant, powered mech suit.”
THE MONDO SPIDER
Three years after his initial Burning Man experience, Tippett returned to the Nevada desert for the festival’s 2006 edition. This time he was accompanied by the Mondo Spider, an eight-legged, electro-mechanical walking machine, designed and built by a Vancouver-based team that included Tippett in his pre-Exosapien days.
He describes the Mondo Spider as “a Burning Man project I built with half a dozen other gonzo engineers – it started it all.”
Inspired by the televised Junkyard Wars, the giant, 730-kg metallic spider was initially powered by a Honda V-twin engine and a system of hydraulic pumps and motors. After upgrades, it was capable of maintaining a “brisk walking speed” of about six-feet per second (1.8 m/s) or 6.5 km/h (~4 mph).
Along with its Burning Man appearance, the Mondo Spider has also been featured at venues like the Vancouver Art Gallery and at prominent art and technology events and festivals in places such as San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Washington, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
PROSTHESIS
Not long after the Mondo Spider collaboration started, Tippett began working on the Prosthesis project. That undertaking would eventually lead Exosapien Technologies to claim a place in the Guiness Book of World Records for designing and constructing the largest tetrapod exoskeleton to date.
Called Prosthesis, the machine stands almost four meters (12 ft., 11 in.) tall, 5.1 meters (16 ft., 8 in.) long and 5.51 meters (18 ft., 1 in.) wide.
Referred to by Tippett as the “Anti Robot”, his, four-legged, walking creation weighs in at 3,900 kg and is controlled by a human pilot, who is strapped into a full-body exoskeletal interface in the middle of the machine with access to an onboard, 200-hp power plant.
Prosthesis was initially designed as an educational art project under the umbrella of British Columbia’s eatART Foundation, an educational charity co-founded by Tippett in 2007.
“Prosthesis marked a new era in human-machine interaction,” says Tippett. “It’s aimed at celebrating the age-old human pursuit of skill and physical mastery through the use of advanced technology.”
Now, after more than 10 years in development, Prosthesis is capable of lifting a car and can easily tow a truck. It can also run at speeds of up to 6 km/h, negotiate obstacles and run for up to an hour on a battery.
Tippett describes what it’s like to climb in and take control of the machine.
“There is literally nothing like getting into a mech suit that amplifies your strength by about 50 times. At first you’re locked in because the exo-frame is directly linked to the structure of the machine, the legs of the machine,” he explains.
“Until you turn it on, you can’t move. But then the pumps fire up, the fluid starts flowing, the pressure comes up and the machine suddenly gets loose and it gets kind of alive. And, you realize that with the tiniest push of your hand or foot, this 4,000 kg machine will move under your control.”
However, Tippett’s ultimate goal is to make mech racing a legitimate sport or competition. He also says Prosthesis can be used in other applications such as materials handling, search and rescue, disaster response and wildfire fighting.
RECENT UNVEILING
In April 2024, Tippett publicly introduced the Modi Nochi Spider at the Coachella Music Festival in California. The 675 kg, fully operational, all-electric walking spider, inspired by its slightly-heavier predecessor, the Mondo Spider, was a privately-commissioned project.
Canadian musician, singer and producer Grimes (Claire Elise Boucher), who has three children with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk from their three-year relationship, arrived onstage on the Modi Nochi Spider which was operated by Tippett.
According to Tippett, Grimes is fascinated with exoskeletal technology and was only too happy to work with Exosapien Technologies.
“Grimes came to a demo we were giving in the Los Angeles area for (video game publisher) Bandai Namco,” he says.
“She was smitten with the mech and ended up spending two hours shooting with us. She even got to be a test pilot. We’ve kept her abreast of all our subsequent R&D and she still pings me every now and then to see what we’re up to next”
PROTOCASE COMES THROUGH
It was during the development of the Modi Nochi Spider earlier this year that Protocase Inc. first appeared on Tippett’s radar.
At the time, Tippett was in desperate need of some custom panels for the new Spider machine. He was chatting with a university friend who told him about Protocase and its quick lead times on custom orders of any quantity.
“We needed sheet metal parts – fast!” he says.
Tippett explained that he required protective panels to shield the components inside the legs and interior from environmental harm and to protect the operator from harm by all the moving parts.
“I sent 3D models, which were tweaked by the Protocase production team for manufacturing, and within days they were in our shop and fit perfectly,” he says.
“I even got my quantities wrong on an order four days before a testing deadline, but Protocase got right on it and sent me the missed panel within 72 hours. It was pretty nuts. We sing the praises of Protocase at every opportunity. And, we look forward to working with Protocase again in the future.”
CARPE MACHINAM (Seize the Machine)
With two decades of exoskeletal experience under his belt, Tippett and his team are now using their expertise to develop what they refer to as a brand new class of vehicle.
Called the ExoQuad, Tippett describes the 1,000-kg conveyance as a cross between a mech suit, a motorcycle and a quad. He says the vehicle will have four wheels on hyper-articulated suspensions that the pilot actively controls with hands and feet from an interface, much like a sport bike.
“It will be able to raise-up and lower, pre-emptively react to large obstacles and will lean to turn. It will be like riding a rollercoaster where you make your own track as you go,” he says.
“You will lean the machine to turn and you’ll be able to jump when there is no jump. This machine will make you feel like you are flying without using wings.”