Sarcos Guardian XO

$100,000 per year (rental)Sarcos offered the Guardian XO only as a rental at about $100,000 per suit per year, with a minimum of about 10 units and a dedicated engineer, as reported by IEEE Spectrum in December 2019; it was never sold outright.

Discontinued · unavailableButtons onlyFull-body exoskeleton90 kg lift24 DoFDiscontinued 2023

UnavailableNever sold. Sarcos offered it only as a rental to industrial and military customers, shipped about two units before exiting hardware in 2023, and Palladyne AI no longer lists any exoskeleton. Palladyne AI ↗

Control: Not possible for customers; tuning was done by Sarcos engineers.

IEEE Spectrum ↗Exoskeleton Report at CES 2020 ↗Palladyne AI (Wikipedia) ↗Archived product page ↗

Overview

The Guardian XO was a battery-powered full-body exoskeleton from Sarcos Robotics of Salt Lake City, the descendant of the tethered hydraulic Raytheon Sarcos XOS 2 from 2010. Shown at CES 2020 with launch customer Delta Air Lines, it let a worker lift 90 kg as if it were 4.5 kg, with powered arms, 24 degrees of freedom and a self-supporting 68 kg frame, and the US Air Force and SOCOM funded military versions. Alpha units went out in early 2020 and commercial versions were promised for later that year, but launch dates kept slipping, and by October 2023 only two units had shipped. In November 2023 the board voted to leave hardware, and the company became the AI software firm Palladyne AI in March 2024, so the XO was never sold. It remains the most capable strength-amplifying suit to reach customer trials, far beyond back-assist exoskeletons like the German Bionic Apogee.

Specifications

Category	Exoskeletons & exosuits · Full-body, military & research
Released	2020
Country	USA
Availability	Discontinued · unavailable
Sales	Only two units had shipped by October 2023, when Sarcos decided to stop hardware work. Wikipedia ↗
Programmability	No programmability
Built-in autonomy	Reactive · Responds to its surroundings without a map, such as avoiding obstacles or following a person
LLM support	None · No voice assistant or LLM.
Vision sensors	No vision sensors
Actuators	Brushless / direct-drive motors
Audio	No audio
Compute type	Proprietary / undisclosed
Control	Buttons only
Weight	68 kg (150 lb), self-supporting
Assistance	Lets the wearer lift up to 90 kg (200 lb) repeatedly while it feels like about 4.5 kg (10 lb), with powered arms, back and legs and about 450 Nm of peak joint torque, so the suit carries its own weight.
Joints	Full body
Battery & runtime	Two hot-swappable 500 Wh battery packs of about 5.4 kg (12 lb) each, over 2 hours of normal work per set (Sarcos later claimed up to 8 hours for the XO Max), drawing about 500 W while carrying 73 kg at 4.8 km/h.
Operation	Force sensors read every motion of the operator and the suit moves its own limbs in parallel with no noticeable lag, so there are no buttons to drive it; the hands grip end-effectors on the powered arms.
Speed	Up to 4.8 km/h (3 mph)
Sensors	Force sensors at the operator interface and joint sensors throughout the 24-DoF frame.
Compute	Not published
SDK	None

Timeline

Dec 2019AnnouncedAlpha units announced for industrial and military customers, rental at about $100,000 per year IEEE Spectrum ↗
Jan 2020Trade showShown at CES 2020 with launch customer Delta Air Lines Exoskeleton Report ↗
Nov 2023UpdateSarcos board votes to exit hardware development Wikipedia ↗
Mar 2024UpdateSarcos renamed Palladyne AI, software only Wikipedia ↗