Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) are robotic limbs that, when worn, give you more limbs than you'd normally have. In other words, they're not robotic limbs designed to replace biological limbs that you might be missing, but rather robotic limbs designed to augment the number of limbs that you have already.
MIT researchers have been developing SRLs that can help you do stuff that would be annoying, uncomfortable, or impossible to do on your own. Today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Hong Kong, they presented their latest SRL prototypes, with one model featuring a pair of limbs that spring from your shoulders and another with limbs that extend from your waist.
MIT's shoulder-mounted SRL is designed to assist in tasks that take place over your head, or in situations where your other two arms are busy and you need a hand (literally) with something. One example, shown in the second video below, would be in a construction context, where anything that needs to be attached to a ceiling has to be held up and hammered or screwed into place at the same time.
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Having held stuff up in situations where there was no place for someone else to help, something like this would be a life saver. or at least minimize the frustration level. If it ever becomes a product, I'm there. So there. One improvement (besides hands): connect the above to this.
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