MIT lab designs workload-sharing robotic limbs (w/ Video)

Mention "robotic limbs" and one thinks of devices being developed to replace the loss of human limbs. Mention "exoskeleton" and one thinks of a suit governing and bound to the entire body. Researchers at the d'Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology at MIT, led by Professor Harry Asada, Ford Professor of Engineering, have been breaking ground in another direction. They are working in a co-robot world, and they are developing "extras" for what the person already has. Videos showing people performing tasks tell a story of what future work might look like when an extra set of arms or legs will be of significant help. "Supernumerary Robotic Limbs" (SRLs) is the formal term to describe robotic limbs that, when worn, augment limbs already in place.

"Imagine that one day humans will have a third arm and a third leg attached to their body. The extra limbs will help them hold objects, support the human body, share a workload, and streamline the execution of a task. If the movements of such supernumerary limbs are tightly coupled and coordinated with their arms, the human users may come to perceive the extra limbs as an extension of their own body," the Lab team suggest on their site. "The goal of our work is to build a co-robot that becomes a functional extension of the human body."

In such settings, the extra arm or leg attached to the body helps to hold objects, share workloads, and streamline tasks......


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-06-mit-lab-workload-sharing-robotic-limbs.html#jCp