People usually hard to do activities requiring more than one person to handle. For example, a man needs a working partner to repair ceilings or he need other people’s help to open the locked door while his two hands are gripping other things.
Inspired by character of Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man movie, researchers of Diponegoro University’s Faculty of Engineering did a research for adding two robotic arms to people. The researchers are Deddy Mulianto and Tanto Nugroho, as well as lecturers of Mechanical Engineering Mochammad Ariyanto, ST, MT, Dr. Eng. Munadi, ST, MT and Joga Dharma Setiawan, BSc., MSc., PhD. In the research, they made additional robotic arms for helping user to do work requiring more than two arms.
The supernumerary robotic arms controls its motions by Neural Network. The robot also reads sensor of IMU (Inertial Measuring Unit) on user’s two hands for directing the additional limbs, and it responds to flex sensor on user’s little fingers for controlling actions of soft robotic gripper.
“It can be worked by directing IMU sensors on user’s arms in roll or pitch motions or by using flex sensor to control soft gripper actions for gripping an object, and the flex sensor will lock the actions so user’s arms can freely do other jobs while the robotic arms worked,” said Tanto Nugroho accompanied by Dedy Mulianto.
You can watch video demo of the additional robotic arms at this link:
