Robotic third arm controlled by breathing is surprisingly easy to use

People can learn to control a robotic third arm using their eyes and chest muscles. Such extra limbs could become essential tools for surgeons or people working in industrial jobs, say researchers. Giulia Dominijanni at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and her colleagues created real robotic third arms and virtual ones inside VR environments, all controlled by a combination of eye movements and diaphragm contractions. In tests, 65 volunteers were able to successfully carry out a range of tasks without interfering with their normal breathing, speech or vision. Unlike prosthetics for people with amputated limbs, which can attach to a stump and use existing nerve connections to the brain, augmented devices require entirely new connections and are therefore more difficult to engineer, says Dominijanni.