Extra limbs could provide a productivity boost to people working in a range of jobs, and experiments show that people are capable of controlling them intuitively
By Matthew Sparkes
13 December 2023
Researcher Martina Gini controls a simplified robotic arm with breathing
Alain Herzog/EPFL
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.
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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.
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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. But the experiments show that peoples’ brains are capable of adapting to these devices and controlling them quite intuitively.
“I’m pretty good at it at this point,” she says. “It becomes very natural. I’m an engineer by training, and every time I have to solder, that’s pretty annoying; I would love to have something I could control and hold stuff in place.”