Development of Piano Playing Robot

피아노 연주 로봇의 개발

This paper presents a beat gesture recognition method to synchronize the tempo of a robot playing a piano with the desired tempo of the user. To detect an unstructured beat gesture expressed by any part of a body, we apply an optical flow method, and obtain the trajectories of the center of gravity and normalized central moments of moving objects in images. The period of a beat gesture is estimated from the results of the fast Fourier transform. In addition, we also apply a motion control method by which robotic fingers are trained to follow a set of trajectories, Since the ability to track the trajectories influences the sound a piano generates, we adopt an iterative learning control method to reduce the tracking error.