Just down the road from me, Professor Kim and his happy elves in the Kimlab have been fiddling around with robot arms. This fall they demonstrated the PAPRAS Backpack, which is a “Robotic Backpack System with Pluggable Supernumerary Limbs” [1].
Clearly, the main purpose was to show that, “yes, yes we can build it!” And one of their videos is explicit: this is inspired by comic books and movies. (A 2021 video was titled “PAPRAS: Backpack (Tribute to Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man)”
Fair enough.
But, I have to say that this demonstration raises more questions than it answers. How would you ever use something like this? What would you do with it? Where do you get shirts with six arm holes?
Even in the Hollywood version, the extra arms seem more decorative than useful. (Not to mention that the extra arms seem to be symptoms of Dr. Octopus’ serious mental issues.)
Clearly, controlling four extra limbs is going to be a challenging mental load, and will take quite a bit of practice. One also wonders about safety protocols, with your reach extending in radically unfamiliar ways. So, there is lots of interesting research to be done here.
If you assigned me to teach someone to safely and sanely control this backpack, and to do useful things with it, then I think I would want to cooperate with experts in embodied movement—dancers. I’m pretty sure that there are some folks very near the Kimlab who would be very interested to collaborate.
Anyway, this is a great student project. Give them an ‘A’!
- Chaerim Moon, Sean Taylor, Kevin G Gim, Sankalp Yamsani, Kazuki Shin, Kyungseo Park, and Joohyung Kim, Robotic Backpack System with Pluggable Supernumerary Limbs, in EEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2023). 2023: Detroit.
Robot Wednesday
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