A fall left a man paralyzed. Now a robotic ‘exoskeleton’ lets him walk again.

Five years after he fell while building a treehouse, paralyzing him from the waist down, Scot Mills stood from his chair at Carolinas Rehabilitation on Monday and took a stroll outdoors.

He did it while strapped to a robotic “exoskeleton,” a device named after the rigid outer covers that in nature supports and protects insects, spiders and shellfish.

Mills, 43, who lives in Rocky Mount, Va., trained twice a week for two months at the Charlotte hospital before becoming its first graduate of a program in home use of the device.

After the 24-foot fall shattered a vertebra, doctors told him he wouldn’t walk again. “I thought it was over,” Mills said. “What can you do in a wheelchair?”