Drummers: You Can Now Have a Third Arm

A couple of years ago, we learned about Jason Barnes, a one-armed Atlanta man who is able to play drums thanks to a robotic prosthesis developed at Georgia Tech. Essentially, the dude is a cyborg drummer.

Not satisfied stopping there, Georgia Tech’s Professor Gil Weinberg and his students have now taken the next steps towards ensuring that robot overlords control us all: they’ve developed a robotic arm which can be used by drummers who still have both of their arms. In other words… they can give you a third limb.

Explains How Stuff Works:

“The biomechatronic device attaches to a drummer’s shoulder to add a third arm that responds to the music and motions around it. The robot drumming device can also improvise as it plays, and future iterations may eventually know its users so well that it can read brain wavesto sense where the music is going next.”

The article continues:

“[The arm] features accelerometers that tell the arm how close it is to the drum set and lets it know when to change angles and reach. The arm also recognizes a drummer’s gestures and senses the speed and style of play to respond accordingly.”

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you’re terrified of Skynet), Professor Weinberg and his team have yet to successfully link the arm directly to the user’s brain:

“They’re currently tinkering with an electroencephalogram (EEG) headband that reads a user’s brain waves. The idea is to detect patterns that would signal the prosthesis before changes in patter and tempo happen. A successful drumming robot could provide the groundwork for other robotic third-arm helpers with medical, military and construction applications, among others.”

It could also provide groundwork for Doctor Octopus becoming a really real thing, but the article doesn’t seem concerned with that.

Here’s video of the arm in action:

Thanks: Ryan W.