The Supernumerary Robotic 3rd Thumb for Skilled Music Tasks

TL;DR

This paper presents a supernumerary robotic third thumb designed to augment piano playing, demonstrating that naive users can adapt to and control it for 11-finger performance within hours, advancing human-robot integration in skilled tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel robotic third thumb platform for musical augmentation and demonstrates rapid user adaptation for complex piano performance.

Findings

Naive users can learn to control the robotic thumb within hours.

The robotic thumb enables piano playing with 11 fingers.

Functional augmentation of piano skills demonstrated.

Abstract

Wearable robotics bring the opportunity to augment human capability and performance, be it through prosthetics, exoskeletons, or supernumerary robotic limbs. The latter concept allows enhancing human performance and assisting them in daily tasks. An important research question is, however, whether the use of such devices can lead to their eventual cognitive embodiment, allowing the user to adapt to them and use them seamlessly as any other limb of their own. This paper describes the creation of a platform to investigate this. Our supernumerary robotic 3rd thumb was created to augment piano playing, allowing a pianist to press piano keys beyond their natural hand-span; thus leading to functional augmentation of their skills and the technical feasibility to play with 11 fingers. The robotic finger employs sensors, motors, and a human interfacing algorithm to control its movement in real-time. A proof of concept validation experiment has been conducted to show the effectiveness of the robotic finger in playing musical pieces on a grand piano, showing that naive users were able to use it for 11 finger play within a few hours.