SHAY PILCHER IRONMAN, LEGOS, AND A PASSION FOR CHANGE: AUBURN ENTREPRENEUR AIMS TO POWER THE PERFORMANCE, ENDURANCE OF U.S. COMBATANTS.
was killed while serving overseas. ‘When he fi nally became old enough for me to tell him what happened to his father,’ she said, ‘he told me that maybe if daddy had had an Ironman suit, he could have fought off the bad guys.’” “I went home and cried my eyes out over and over,” confessed Pilcher. “Here I was feeling so down about getting a bad grade in a class. That’s when I realized there are more important issues to focus on, bigger things I could be doing.”
Pilcher says she is focused on special forces combatants because of the unique challenges they face and the lack of viable solutions to their most critical needs. “From what the military experts I’ve spoken with tell me, when you’re being shot at, the key thing is to be able to move and keep moving – all while carrying 40 or 50 pounds of gear. You have to go and keep going, and you’re going to get tired. Our mission is to keep soldiers – and fi re fi ghters, paramedics and other fi rst responders, for that matter – from getting tired. We want them to be able to keep moving. Endurance is our fi rst goal. We want to make sure that if they need to move for miles at a time without slowing down, we’re going to empower them to do just that.” The exosuit Archangel Defense is developing will do the bulk of the work for the wearer, helping them maintain a steady, high rate of speed – all while leaving their arms and hands free to hold and fi re their weapons at will. Lift-assist systems developed primarily for commercial applications don’t even attempt to do that. The structural, bio-mechanical and electronic considerations these basic units are designed around simply won’t work for the much more sophisticated, free-motion systems required for active combat scenarios. “Wearers will have the full range of body motion,” notes Pilcher. “This is not going to inhibit their normal range of movement – nor obstruct their fi eld of vision. These are key design mandates. Another feature of our system is that it doesn’t engage until needed – it knows when assistance is called for and how much to
It is hard to trace exactly when Shay Pilcher, founder of Archangel Defense and a research engineer at Auburn’s Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, began her entrepreneurial journey , but suffi ce to say, it was very early in her life. One incident that occurred just a few years ago solidifi ed that mission. “I was standing in the checkout line at Walmart one night,” says Pilcher, “I’m pretty sure it was in the spring of 2020. I’d had a rough semester and was carrying a big bag of chips in one hand and a tub of ice cream in the other to try and soothe my soul. Right in front of me was a mom and her little boy, who was holding up a huge box of Legos saying ‘Please, please, please can we buy this? Please!’ And the mom was saying, ‘No, I’m not buying that.” “Now, I had grown up on Legos, building things with my dad, and it struck a chord in me. It just so happened that the little boy was holding the Marvel Ironman set, and Ironman was my favorite action hero growing up. I said to the mom “I don’t want to be rude, but would you mind if I bought it for him? I grew up playing with Legos, loved Ironman and I’m an engineering student at Auburn. It would just thrill me if I could get it for him.” “After a little back and forth, she lets me buy it for him and, of course, he’s all excited. As we were walking out of the store and started going to our respective cars, she turned back to me as her boy walked ahead and said, ‘I want to thank you again and feel I need to tell you why he likes Ironman so much.’ And then she explained to me that when her son was a baby, his father
Talk about passion!
IRONMAN SUITS
Pilcher’s entrepreneurial journey began well before her Walmart Legos epiphany, and Ironman played a role in it as far back as she can remember. Her company’s mission is to design and produce customized “exosuits” that replicate and power critical human movements to provide wearers with additional muscle strength and endurance – particularly while running or carrying heavy equipment. Initial applications target U.S. special forces military combatants who often need extended range of movement while packing heavy gear or traveling long distances at rapid speeds. Other markets include medical devices, robotic prosthetics, physical therapy and athletics. “The term ‘exoskeleton’ has been used to describe some of what we’re doing, but that connotes a very limiting physical structure such as those used to assist workers lifting boxes in a warehouse, for example. What we’re talking about is much closer to Ironman capabilities than these relatively rudimentary robotic assist systems.”
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