University students realize a piano playing humanoid

Drexel University students have developed a robot that can play piano. With the new development, the University students have moved far ahead in realizing their aim of engineering a humanoid that can take part in live music and dance performances along with humans. RoboNova is the miniature humanoid for rapid prototyping and testing, which was used for research. A group of students under Alyssa Batula and electrical and computer engineering professor Dr. Youngmoo Kim developed it into a music-playing robot.

piano playing robot

Mr. Kim now feels confident of moving ahead to fulfill their dream of developing a complete stage performing humanoid. Projects like this will help the students in the University learn more about human creativity and expression. However, he adds that it is very difficult to mimic human’s creative performances using robots.

The students have captured video clips of RoboNova playing 'Chopsticks', 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star', and making some simple steps of dancing as well. Anyway, the piano-playing robot will give developers more confidence to go on with such experiments. Alyssa Batula says:

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.

Via: Drexel