Development of a Novel Two-Hand Playing Piano Robot

Abstract

Currently, we realize a two-hand playing piano robot which can recognize printed piano score in real time and then play piano by itself. The playing piano robot is composed of two subsystems: a vision system and a two-hand playing system. In this paper, we focus on presenting the two-hand playing system that consists of a finger system and an arm system for each hand. For the finger system, we design a simple signal control module which can receive a signal from the host computer and drive an exact tubular solenoid after the signal is decoded. The arm system is driven by two linear motors, each of which carries a hand to run a different gamut by sliding from left to right or vice versa. In addition, because the sliding ranges of these two linear motors are overlapped, we create a collision avoidance mechanism to ensure their motions are safe and sound. The experimental results reveal that the two-hand playing system can play theme and accompaniment simultaneously which has the ability of playing chords. The safe speed of playing must be smaller than tempo 100. So far, the two-hand playing system works smoothly and undeniably.