Enhancing human bodies with extra robotic arms and fingers: The Neural Resource Allocation Problem

Human augmentation by wearable supernumerary robotic limbs: review and perspectives

“…with a grounded robot), the interface is worn by the user. The role of the sensorimotor interface is to provide motor commands from the human to the SRL, and to provide feedback (mostly haptic) from the SRL to the human, as also pointed out in [8].…”

“…A promising direction for the control of SRLs is to exploit users' musculoskeletal redundancy, i.e. body motions and muscle activations that do not affect the main physical interaction with the environment performed by biological hands [8]. In this way, a true bodily augmentation would be achieved and users would be able to simultaneously and concurrently control natural and artificial limbs.…”

“…The placement of feedback interfaces and the type of transmitted stimuli should be carefully chosen, aiming at compensating for the missing direct physical connection with the SRL. The choice of the tactile channel allows to maintain the main physiological channel of sensorimotor feedback [8,125] and to avoid overloading of vision and/or hearing. Dually with respect to the motor control, haptic information must not interfere with other haptic stimuli coming from the interaction of natural limbs with the environment, otherwise it could be difficult for the user to detect and interpret it.…”

“…This aspect is not discussed in [6], while it is briefly reviewed in another recent work [7], which analyses SRLs developed until 2019 and classifies them based on the envisaged application and the adopted control method. Neuroscientific considerations on the 'Neural Resource Allocation' problem are the focus of [8], where only some works presenting methodologies for the assessment of sensorimotor control of SRLs are considered.…”