Researchers at Tokyo-based Keio
University’s Graduate School of Media Design, led the development of a
robotic-arms-on-a-backpack project, called Fusion, to explore how people may be
able to work together to control one person’s body. The operator of the robotic
arms and hands can pick things up or move around the arms and hands of the
human wearing the backpack. The mechanical hands can be removed and replaced
with straps that go around the backpack-wearer’s wrists if you want to truly
remote control their arms. The backpack includes a PC that streams data
wirelessly between the robotic arm-wearer and the person controlling the limbs
in VR.
The PC also connects to a
microcontroller, letting it know how to position the robotic arms and hands and
how much torque to apply to the joints. The robotic arms, each with seven
joints, jut out of the backpack, along with a connected head, of sorts. The
head has two cameras that show the remote operator, in VR, a live feed of
everything the backpack-wearer is seeing. When the operator moves their head in
VR, sensors track that motion and cause the robotic head to move in response. The
wearable system is powered by a battery that lasts about an hour and a half.
It’s heavy, weighing in at nearly 21 pounds.
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