Development of an anthropomorphic flute robot for the application in science and technology museum

To resemble the appearance of human beings, humanoid robots should be designed with many DOFs, however, it increases the complexity of the mechanical design and the real-time control, which will make a high cost and have a poor reliability and will not fit for the application in museums or human's daily lives. In this paper, to enable the low cost and high reliability robot to interact with humans naturally and sever humans more friendly, we imported advanced technology of the Waseda's flute robot and retained the most important mechanical parts, such as the lip, lungs and the fingers for the flute playing, on this basis, some other mechanical structures were redesigned; particularly, the robot's appearance was carefully designed; in addition, we also redesigned the hardware structure using our own joint controllers and software system based on CAN bus communication for the cost saving and high reliability. The redesigned robot had just 16 DOFs. Preliminary performance test results showed that this new redesigned robot achieved in producing high quality of flute sound and high sound conversion efficiency, and the period of communication was about 4ms.