Controller design for music playing robot — Applied to the anthropomorphic piano robot

Simple and friendly operation panel, intelligent algorithm, high performance control and driving circuit and precision and reliable plant are the necessary conditions for music playing robot design. In this paper, a hierarchical control structure, host controller (PC) and local controller (FPGA), is proposed to implement the anthropomorphic piano robot control with parallel controlling of two hands and ten fingers. In order to simplify the programming on the host controller and increase the performance of the whole system, the actuators of the hands (linear motors) and fingers (servo motors) are controlled and driving by local controllers, the FPGA-based controllers. The host PC is in charge of to integrate and encode the music codes of playing music to command the robot via the local controller, namely FPGA controller or distributed control module. The host controller is programmed with an intelligent algorithm to generate the music control code and an interactive man-machine interface. Giving a music score, the intelligent algorithm will generate a series of optimum positions commands for the hands and fingers of the piano robot to play the piano. The series of optimum positions commands are programmed with crashing protection and minimum movement for the hands and fingers to anthropomorphize the robot. After the codes receiving, the local controller will quick decode the commanding such as the position of two hands, opening angle of ten fingers and key rapping of ten fingers to control the driving circuits of actuators of the hands and fingers.