New experiments show simulated robotic limbs can feel like a part of our own body with a little...
A new study suggests that people can in fact adapt to using additional robotic arms as if the limbs were their own body parts.
Many roboticists are interested in building systems that would give humans the ability to use additional limbs and potentially enable people to complete tasks that require an extra arm or leg-or even a tail.
Researchers immersed participants in a VR environment that included an avatar of themselves-with an extra pair of virtual robotic arms just below their real ones.
Experimenting with a real-world pair of robotic arms comes with the challenge of getting them to move without a delay, as our brain would expect from our real body parts.
People manipulating the arms in VR were also able to feel when the limbs interacted with virtual objects.
Once hooked into the VR setup, participants dove into a coordination task, using the extra arms to "Touch" balls that appeared in random locations.
Participants rated how much they agreed with statements such as "I felt as if the virtual robot limbs/arms were my limbs/arms" and "I felt as if the movements of the virtual robot arm were influencing my own movements." When they had completed the ball-touch task multiple times, people's responses became faster-and they also reported feeling more ownership of and agency over their new arms.
Another experiment tested how quickly people moved their robotic arms in response to virtual touches.
Sometimes the sensation didn't match where the object appeared to be in VR. When the visible location of the VR object and the place it felt like the robotic limb was being touched lined up, participants jerked their robotic arms away slightly more quickly than they did when the sensation did not correspond to the object's position.
Existing robotics systems could literally lend people an extra pair of hands.