Communications of the ACM
Drexel Students Develop Music-Playing Robot
RoboNova interacting with a Steinway piano.
Drexel University
Drexel University researchers have developed RoboNova, a music-playing robot with the long-term goal of getting it to become an interactive participant in a live music ensemble with other performers.
RoboNova is a kit that can be configured as a humanoid and is capable of mimicking some human gestures. The researchers say that RoboNova has performed several tasks, such as dancing to live music and playing the piano, and will enable researchers to study human expression and learn more about human performance and creativity.
"From a research and psychological perspective, if we can get a humanoid robot to play like a human performer, researchers could use it to study musicians' gestures and see how these gestures affect the quality of the performance," says graduate student Alyssa Batula.
With RoboNova, researchers can review the physical actions of a performance. "It's impossible for humans to repeat a performance exactly, and equally impossible for humans to make precisely pre-defined changes, but a robot can be programmed to do that," says Drexel professor Youngmoo Kim.
From Drexel University
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