Building a "bionic man"

This is Rex, a $1 million "bionic man" built in the UK by roboticists Richard Walker and Matthew Godden. Rex was the star of a new Channel 4 documentary titled "How to Build A Bionic Man." Rex is outfitted with a variety of synthetic systems and appendages, from prosthetic limbs to a cochlear implant, artificial pancreas to retinal implant. He's now on display at the London Science Museum but will visit America in October to promote the Smithsonian Channel's US premier of the documentary, retitled "Cyborg/Frankenstein."

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

MORE: bionics • medical • robots • tv

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

sqyntz

if it doesn’t make the Six-Million-Dollar-Man-Bionic-Sound it’ll never catch on
Sam Ley

Disturbingly reminiscent of a humanoid robot a friend of mine made. It didn’t simulate the functioning of the pancreas, but it was dressed in a clown suit, had a rubber face perpetually trapped in the “O” expression and a throbbing, rotating member. If you sat on its lap it would penetrate you, grip you tightly with its robotic arms, and scream while the head spun around.

I declined to test its full functionality.
plyx

Why does it have Eric Bana’s face?
Frank266

Does he fight sasquatch in this video?
mtdna

Not nearly as impressive as Sesame Street’s Six Dollar Man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrAFle0W228
http://echofox3.blogspot.com efergus3

I don’t think that this is what Dr. Frank-N-Furter had in mind.
- GlyphGryph
  
  In just seven days…
http://excelsior-station.wikidot.com Sarge Misfit

That’s not bionic. That’s a robot. To be bionic it has to have a biological component
- http://twitter.com/rvitelli Romeo Vitelli
  
  That’s where the “org” in “cyborg” is supposed to come in.
  - http://excelsior-station.wikidot.com Sarge Misfit
    
    Yep. And “bio” in bionic :-) In fact, aren’t they interchangeable terms?
- Brainspore
  
  If I understand this project correctly it’s not really a robot so much as an assemblage of high-tech “replacement parts” currently available for human beings. I wonder who has the current record for the greatest number of gizmos installed.
Nick Harvey

This reminds me of a bit of short fiction I read somewhere on the net, which involved the theft of many high tech prosthetic devices, cochlear implant, artificial heart, etc, to build a complete person. Not sure where the brain came from.
- http://twitter.com/writebastard Ian Wood
  
  Abby Normal.
http://codeflow.org/ Florian Bösch

I wonder what the head prosthesis is used for…
- cfuse
  
  Medically diagnosed ugliness.
  - http://codeflow.org/ Florian Bösch
    
    “We’ve determined that your head is broken beyond repair. It would be easiest if we replaced it whole”
eldritch

So this isn’t a research piece? It’s just sitting in a museum? That’s a darn shame.

It would be so much more worthwhile to just donate it to the Mythbusters.
http://jayarava.blogspot.com Jayarava

Some bionic man – he can only go as far as his power cables allow, and trailing that massive pump under the chair. But contrast a tiny fruit fly is a model of elegant design, completely sell powering and guiding, and can reproduce. Hell, an amoeba is more impressive than this guy.