Jet Suit Head-Tracking Shoulder Turret

Flying through the air like Iron Man is a dream of many, and Gravity has been working on making this a reality. While their suits appear to be in a state of constant development, it’s amazing that humans are actually able to fly right now in such a manner. Besides flying, another element to Iron Man’s suit is a wide array of weapons which he uses to dispatch the bad guys—or occasionally scuffle with other superheros before they eventually become friends again.

In James Bruton’s latest video, he designs and builds a shoulder-mounted turret for a Gravity suit, on which is mounted a rather menacing-looking Airsoft gun. The turret follows the pilot's head movements in the vertical direction using an accelerometer setup, while relying on body movements for horizontal aiming.

A Teensy 3.2 is used for control of the rig, and while he initially designed it for horizontal head tracking as well as vertical, this was scraped in order to not hit the pilot’s head. The project includes a trigger mechanism using a cam to fire, and the weapon can be put into safe mode, where firing is disabled and it’s put into an upward angled position.

Jet suit setup starts around 5:00 in the video below, and takeoff is at 7:45. While the device firing while flying is difficult to observe, the pilot says that "it feels amazing," and that he can feel the whole suit shake when using it. One can only image how this type of technology will evolve over time.