Neither human nor robotic: Paraplegics, exoskeleton robots, and a new way of walking

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the production of a new way of walking by observing a South Korean team of robotics engineers, physical therapists, and paraplegics that has developed powered lower exoskeleton robots for the Cybathlon competition. Exoskeletons are wearable robots that facilitate limb movement. While engineering articles and promotional materials show a dream that the robots will make paraplegics free from wheelchairs and walk again, disability studies scholars criticize such a futuristic promise as a technological fix for disability. This thesis attempts to go beyond these disparate perspectives and explores the practices of humans and non-humans to produce walking. Observing the team from September 2019 to March 2020, I explored how distinctive modes of walking were configured, enacted, and sustained by programming, simulation, and training of codes, machines, and bodies. Based on the observation, I propose to call such walking “humatic walking,” as it is a combination of human walking and robotic walking.

Humatic walking emerged only after a long process of configuring exoskeletons and sustaining the human-robot combination. First, I introduce the four modes of walking to configure humatic walking: algorithmic walking, air walking, model walking, and collective walking. Humatic walking is the coalescence of the four modes of walking in which engineers, paraplegics, physical therapists, and robots have enacted walking alone or together. For the next, I show that the fine-tuning work to sustain the human-robot combination renders the integration of paraplegics and robots frictionless. By hand and footwork of physical therapists, engineers, and paraplegics, each paraplegic could have a unique way of walking, which they did not experience before having paralysis. I argue that humatic walking is not an imperfect simulation of “normal walking,” but a new way of walking made possible by the well-arranged human-robot interaction.