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Toyota's Trumpet Playing Robot Showcased
fsharp writes "The New York Times has an article discussing the first public showing of Toyota's new humanoid robot. During a demonstration, the biped robot played trumpet together with a rolling robot. Most telling about the article was the whole philosophy towards R&D: 'Toyota acknowledges that it is unlikely to turn a profit building robots anytime soon, but the program highlights its engineering-oriented culture and willingness to invest in projects that may not pay off for decades.' How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"
http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/309033.htm
Registration free link
I wish article authors would at least put up some effort to find and use reg-free links when possible.
Heres a link to the BBC article.
Hi there
seriously MOD PARENT UP!, that guy made a flute playing "automaton" that had about 12 songs back in 1737
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
It sounds as if it may be cool, but I wonder if these robotic lips are really as advanced as the article suggests, or if instead some kind of shortcut was taken. I was a music major and I played a brass instrument (french horn). Brass instruments do not have a reed or any other artificial source of vibrations. Instead, the performer's own lips are the source of the vibrations. The performer essentially generates a highly-controlled "raspberry" by constricting the muscles that surround the mouth and buzzing the lips while pressed against the mouthpiece (so the sound of a brass instrument is really just an amplified raspberry, artfully done). This is hard enough to do by itself, but it's made even harder by the fact that brass instruments embody the open harmonic series, which means that the peformer can play many notes without changing the valve settings just by adjusting the tension in the mouth (think of a bugle). One of the things that makes a brass player competent is the ability to hit the correct harmonic without cracking the note (also known as a "clam"). It's very hard to get it right consistently. If this robot is really doing all of this, plus pressing the valves, plus articulating the correct attacks and rhythm, and doing all of it well enough to play "Trumpeter's Holiday," I'm impressed!
Here's another one: IBM. Big Blue has been behind so much of the scientific grunt work, a great deal of which has consisted of conceiving of and building experimental scientific equipment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Each robot uses a Pentium III processor as the main CPU along with a Real Time Linux OS. NEC supplied a customized lithium ion battery, which powers the biped robot for about 30 minutes.
AFAIK, they are semi-autonomous in that they can navigate over and around obstacles from point A to point B without being explicitly told to do so.
No offense intended to flute players out there, but speaking as someone who has played both instruments, it would be several orders of magnitude harder for a robot to play a trumpet than a flute.
Woodwind instruments in general tend to prize consistent, solid airflow to make their music. This is ridiculously easy for a machine to do and do exceptionally well. The design or the reed is what does the conversion from airflow into sound.
Brass instruments are an entirely different animal. 90% of playing a brass instrument is in the lips. If you blow straight through a trumpet, nothing happens. You get a whooshy air sound coming out the other end. If you don't buzz your lips together to get a note, you get basically no sound at all. You tighten the lips to go up to a higher note.
It is significantly more impressive that a set of robotic lips have the articulation and control to be able to play the trumpet.
Random and weird software I've written.
1998 figures on military budgets (from http://www.cdi.org/issues/wme/spend.html):
US $265 billion
Russia $48 billion
Japan $45 billion
France $38 billion
UK $33 billion
Germany $32 billion
China $32 billion
Yeah. No military to take up financing. Just 1.5 times the military budget of the UK.
Japan has one of the largest and best-equipped armies in the world, in fact . It's just called a defence force and theoretically prohibited from taking offensive action by the Japanese constitution.