Having extra robotic limbs sure sounds cool, in theory. With an extra arm, you could do all kinds of stuff! Throwing three frisbees at once! Eating three times as many slices of pizza at the same time! Giving three thumbs up! Er, other things! Seriously though, if we're going to get real about supernumerary robotic limbs, we have to know what people really want them for. Guy Hoffman's lab at Cornell has some experience with sticking bits of robots onto people, and in a paper presented at RO-MAN 2017, grad student Vighnesh Vatsal figures out the kinds of tasks for which a third arm might actually be useful.
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