ZeroShot ExoArm

First ExoHuman
Design Week Sketches 1
Design Week Sketches 2
Design Week Sketches 3

Inspiration

While brainstorming, we drew inspiration from Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man, who uses robotic limbs to maneuver and assist himself in everyday tasks. That led to a simple idea: if two arms limit what you can do, adding another could expand your capability. Instead of relying on a second person, why not have an additional arm that works alongside you to give more freedom and control?

What it does

We built a wearable robotic limb mounted on the chest that adds an extra arm to the body. It is controlled through voice commands and powered by a vision-language-action model, allowing it to understand intent and act in real time helping you hold, assist, and accomplish more tasks simultaneously.

How we built it

Our robotics limb system is based on the SO-101 robotics arm system mounted on a 3d printed chest plate. It is powered by an AMD AI Mini PC running a VLA model through LeRobot in order for the limbs to move in regards to user intent.

The VLA model is trained on MI300X GPU provided by AMD through cloud service.

Challenges we ran into

Broke a servo, leaving us with almost no demo for judging (can’t confirm full impact at the time of writing).
We also found that fine-tuning a policy for the third arm is extremely difficult, since the human is constantly moving, forcing the arm into a wide range of orientations