Development of Waseda flutist robot WF-4RIV: Implementation of auditory feedback system

Abstract

Up to now, different kinds of musical performance robots (MPRs) and robotic musicians (RMs) have been developed. MPRs are designed to closely reproduce the motor skills displayed by humans in order to play musical instruments. From this approach, MPRs are used as benchmarks to study the human motor control from an engineering point of view and to understand better the human-robot interaction from a musical point of view. In contrast, RMs are conceived as automated mechanisms designed to create new ways of musical expression from a musical engineering point of view. Our research, at Waseda University, has been focused on developing an anthropomorphic flutist robot. Our research aims in studying the human motor control from an engineering point of view, understanding the ways to facilitate the human-robot interaction and proposing new applications for humanoid robot in musical terms. As a result of our research, the Waseda Flutist Robot No.4 Refined IV (WF-4RIV) has been developed. In a previous research, we focused on improving the mechanical system in order to enhance the clarity of the sound. However, we require performing further improvements to the control system in order to enable the robot to autonomously improve the quality of the sound during the flute performance. For this purpose, we proposed to implement an auditory feedback control system on the flutist robot. The proposed system is composed by a music expressive generator, feed-forward air pressure control system and a pitch evaluation module. From the experimental results with the WF-4RIV, we could confirm the improvements on the flute performance.