We have proposed; as a long-term goal, the development of musical performance robots designed to be able of interacting with musical partners (both human players as well as musical performance robots) at the emotional level of perception.
For this purpose, we are focusing our research in enhancing the perceptual capabilities of the anthropomorphic flutist robot as well as developing a new musical performance robot.
In this research, we are focusing on developing a new musical performance robot which in the future will be able of interacting with the anthropomorphic flutist robot. For this purpose, we have decided to develop a musical performance robot which is able of performing other kind of wind instrument.
Wind instruments fall into one of the following categories: brass instruments and woodwind instruments. One important difference between woodwind and brass instruments is that woodwind instruments are no-directional. This means that the sound produced propagates in all directions with approximately equal volume.
Brass instruments, on the other hand, are highly directional, with most of the sound produced traveling straight outward from the bell. Thus, the wood instruments represent a higher challenge to reproduce the human motor control from an engineering point of view. Basically, there are three types of wood instruments: single reed (i.e. clarinet, saxophone), double reed (i.e. oboe, bagpipes, etc.) and the flute. In particular, we have focused our research on developing an anthropomorphic saxophonist robot since 2008.