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Toyota Unveils Violin-Playing Robot
eldavojohn writes "Toyota has unveiled a robot that can play the violin. From the article: 'Toyota said it planned to further advance the robot's dexterity to enable it to use tools and assist with domestic duties and nursing and medical care. The robot has 17 joints in both of its hands and arms now.' It seems there have been small — or maybe even strange, impractical — advances in robotics repeatedly with demonstrations of robots performing a specialized task. Are we merely struggling to hard code each human activity as we strive for an all purpose android? Is there a chance artificial intelligence & robotics will ever become generalized enough to make interaction interesting?"
will it stay standing if i kick it?
As I write this there are 3 replies to your comment modded up but none of them seem to mention that obvious (I hope) fact that programming this robot to play the violin has absolutely nothing to do with matching the musical abilities of humans. Toyota are not demonstrating a product here. They're not saying "in stores next fall: robots that can play violins". They don't think there's a huge market for violin playing robots out there that is just waiting to be tapped.
The point of this demonstration is to show that their robot research has reached a point where they have built a robot with joints that have sufficient degrees of freedom and controllable accuracy that they can do this kind of stunt. You're supposed to look at a robot playing the violin and say "well, if it can play the violin then it can hold a power drill or other tools!"
I'd suggest that maybe they should program the robot to put together some of the crappy furniture you get from Ikea but then people will claim it wasn't cost effective to use a billion dollar robot to do the work of a home handy man or something.
How we know is more important than what we know.