Brain and Behaviour Laboratory, Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 1;11(1):21375. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-00376-6.
Contemporary robotics gives us mechatronic capabilities for augmenting human bodies with extra limbs. However, how our motor control capabilities pose limits on such augmentation is an open question. We developed a Supernumerary Robotic 3rd Thumbs (SR3T) with two degrees-of-freedom controlled by the user's body to endow them with an extra contralateral thumb on the hand. We demonstrate that a pianist can learn to play the piano with 11 fingers within an hour. We then evaluate 6 naïve and 6 experienced piano players in their prior motor coordination and their capability in piano playing with the robotic augmentation. We show that individuals' augmented performance with the SR3T could be explained by our new custom motor coordination assessment, the Human Augmentation Motor Coordination Assessment (HAMCA) performed pre-augmentation. Our work demonstrates how supernumerary robotics can augment humans in skilled tasks and that individual differences in their augmentation capability are explainable by their individual motor coordination abilities.
当代机器人技术为我们提供了机电一体化的能力，可以通过额外的肢体来增强人体。然而，我们的运动控制能力如何对这种增强施加限制，这是一个悬而未决的问题。我们开发了一种具有两个自由度的 Supernumerary Robotic 3rd Thumbs（SR3T），由用户的身体控制，为他们的手上提供一个额外的对侧拇指。我们证明，一个钢琴家可以在一个小时内学会用 11 根手指弹钢琴。然后，我们评估了 6 名新手和 6 名有经验的钢琴演奏者在先前的运动协调能力以及使用机器人增强后的钢琴演奏能力。我们表明，个体在使用 SR3T 时的增强表现可以用我们新的定制运动协调评估来解释，即增强前的人类增强运动协调评估（HAMCA）。我们的工作表明，多余的机器人技术如何在熟练任务中增强人类，并且他们的增强能力的个体差异可以通过他们的个体运动协调能力来解释。
