This Robot Arm Can Be Worn Like A Backpack

The Biorobotics Lab of Carnegie Mellon is widely known for being the modular snake robot’s birthplace. This kind of robot was first designed for squeezing into tight and narrow spots to assist in searching and rescuing missions as well as infrastructure inspections. It has kicked off an army of many unique projects, along with a Pittsburgh-area startup.

A few years back, the robot was changed into modular, which means engineers could mix and match the pieces as well as replace the malfunctioning segments. A group of CMU students has been able to build many different projects based on those modules. There is a hexapod robot which is similar to a spider. Its six limbs are made from robotic segments. We did spend some time with Hebi, too. It has a modular robotic actuator which is capable of commercializing the versions from lab’s research.

Two years later, the crew of researchers had already had a whole new project to present us. In his explanation, Julian Whitman - a doctoral student at CMU expressed that students who belong to that group were highly self-directed. Therefore, they tended to come up with their projects.

He later added that they often get their inspiration from the capability of their hardware and reconfigure them into many kinds of shapes. There would be times people would just stare at a bunch of modules. Then, they would build that as well as quickly write a program to make it does some interesting behavior. Sometimes that would spur a whole new direction for researching.

Whitman also has his project which turns the modules into an extra limb that you can wear. However, this system, quickly pointed out by him, is indeed not an exoskeleton. Instead, it’s more like a robotic arm which is mounted to a support structure that you can wear like a backpack. The idea is to let wearers complete tasks that may be somewhat too difficult to finish using only two hands.

One task that is quite common in the airplane or automotive assembly is holding something up over one’s head while fixing it to the ceiling. Therefore, if you were putting something on an airplane’s roof or a car’s bottom, there would likely be two people completing this task, one of whom just need to keep the part in place while the other one fixes it — explained Whitman before he demonstrated the action.

With the project, you now have an extra limb which you can control with just a gamepad. Whitman claimed that you could add even more limbs, as many “as a person can carry,” However, there is still a significant limitation that is it depends on the number of limbs the user can control simultaneously.

He is currently controlling the project using voice commands or simply just a button. That means there are two sets for voice commands and two others for buttons. He also said that At a certain point, it would become somewhat harder to control and seem to be less useful, especially when you add more arms. However, they were hoping to get these arms autonomous some day in the future so they would have some processes for making a decision as well as a perception for themselves.