Things You Can Do With an Extra Robotic Arm

Having extra robotic limbs sure sounds cool, in theory. With an extra arm, you could do all kinds of stuff! Seriously though, if we're going to get real about supernumerary robotic limbs, we have to know what people really want them for. Guy Hoffman's lab at Cornell has some experience with sticking bits of robots onto people, and in a paper presented at RO-MAN 2017, grad student Vighnesh Vatsal figures out the kinds of tasks for which a third arm might actually be useful. The robotic arm that the Cornell researchers are experimenting with is a new design that's a compromise between an extra arm mounted on the torso and extra fingers (or an extra thumb) mounted on the hand.