Written on May 30, 2008 – 11:05 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Good news for armless persons! The creator of the Segway, Dean Kamen, is about to complete his Luke Arm project.

Kamen's company, DEKA Research, has managed to integrate some cool new features in the arm's interface, adding to the early mechanical prototype some spatial and neural interfaces. The man in the image above had his arm nerves transected in a misfortunate military operation, but that didn’t stop Kamen’s team to interface his nerve remnants directly to the robotic arm, enabling him to delicately utilize numerous degrees of motion within hours of installation.

Still in development, the spatial is claimed to intelligently give some control of movement back to the arm itself, while the non-invasive mind interface utilizes infrared to read neural signals through the skull. In order to provide more balance and motion control with heavier usage, a new body-mounting chassis was built, featuring embedded bladders that inflate.

I’ll leave you with an interesting clip that better explains all the technologies inside of the robotic arm.