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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.
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.'"
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.