This wearable robotic arm can hold tools, pick fruit, and punch through walls

We’ve always had a soft spot for supernumerary robotic limbs here at The Verge, but this latest example of the genre is one of the most impressive we’ve seen to date. Designed by researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada, it’s a hydraulic arm that sits on the wearer’s hip and uses a three-fingered manipulator to carry out a range of tasks.

As reported by IEEE Spectrum, the arm has three degrees of freedom, can move at a speed of 3.4 meters per second, and can lift five kilograms in weight. It’s pretty light and weighs just four kilograms, roughly the same as a human arm. But that’s primarily because it uses a hefty external power source that’s attached via a short tether, limiting...

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