Performance control system of dulcimer music-playing robot

Abstract

Music-playing robots have been gradually applied to art performance, music education and so on. This paper introduces a special robot playing dulcimer, a kind of Chinese traditional musical instrument. With mechanical characteristics taken into accounted, an assignment method of performance task and an inverse kinematics control algorithm of redundant robot manipulators are proposed in this paper. Based on these studies, a performance control system is developed, which can parse a given MIDI file, perform task allocation, and control the dual mechanical arms holding bamboo hammers to strike the strings of dulcimer. The experimental test shows that the performance control system is able to control the dulcimer music-playing robot to complete music performance in real-time in a humanized way.