Companies that make exoskeleton suits are hoping the devices might soon become as commonly provided as wheelchairs. Private medical insurers and at least three state health providers have agreed to cover the cost of the cyborg-type wearables for people unable to walk. Germany made a landmark decision this year when it registered exoskeletons – normally prohibitively expensive at prices in the tens of thousands of pounds – on its official list of medical aids, providing a degree of obligation on insurers to pay. In Italy, the Israeli-made ReWalk suit was added to a state-run workplace insurance body. The US Department of Veterans Affairs has expanded its policy to include the devices at private rehabilitation clinics for veterans with spinal cord injuries.

Graduating university represents the culmination of years of hard work for most, but for Canberra man and paraplegic Paul Jenkins it marked something much more. Mr Jenkins has spent the past six months training in an exoskeleton device and on Tuesday realised his dream of walking on stage at Parliament House and accepting his two bachelor degrees from the University of Canberra. Paul Jenkins, left paralysed by a motorcycle accident, is the first person in Australia approved under the NDIS to use a robotic walker that allows him to walk with the help of crutches. Counter-terrorism police are investigating links to terrorism in the stabbing death of a man in Queanbeyan, New South Wales. Police hunt for two teenagers after a service station worker was stabbed to death near the ACT border on Thursday night.

Arthur Renowitzky can't help but command attention as he walks down the street on a sunny autumn morning. A driver lowers her window to flash a smile and a thumbs-up. "You got this," she says. Renowitzky has been paralyzed since 2007 after being shot in the chest for $20 and a fake gold chain. But he can stand and walk, using crutches for balance, when wearing an exoskeleton suit with motorized hips and knees powering his movements.

Arthur Renowitzky can't help but command attention as he walks down the street on a sunny autumn morning. A driver lowers her window to flash a smile and a thumbs-up. "You got this," she says. Renowitzky has been paralyzed since 2007 after being shot in the chest for $20 and a fake gold chain. But he can stand and walk, using crutches for balance, when wearing an exoskeleton suit with motorized hips and knees powering his movements.

Paralyzed for the past 20 years, former Israeli paratrooper Radi Kaiof now walks down the street issuing a faint mechanical hum. That is the sound of an electronic exoskeleton that moves the 41-year-old's legs and propels him forward. "I never dreamed I would walk again. After I was wounded, I forgot what it's like," said Kaiof, who was injured while serving in the Israeli military in 1988. "Only when standing up can I feel how tall I really am and speak to people eye to eye, not from below."

Andre van Rüschen has no memory of the day he lost all feeling in his legs. After a car accident in Germany, he had a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. When he woke up from a coma in a hospital in Hamburg, the doctors told him he would never walk again. But now, thirteen years later, van Rüschen is back on his feet, and he is training to compete as a pilot in the Powered Exoskeleton race at the Cybathlon in Zurich this month. In a high-rise office building on Leipziger Platz in Berlin, he slides out of his wheelchair onto a black leather pouf where a ReWalk exoskeleton sits folded.