Application of Pneumatic Soft Actuators as End-effectors on a Humanoid Torso Playing Percussion Instrument

Art and music are explored a lot in robotics as people strive to bridge the gap between how a human performs compared to a robot. The variations a person uses to produce different types of sounds are not easily achievable by robots. Various aspects, such as time of contact to note, the force exerted, and contact angle, cause such variations. This paper proposes a pneumatic actuator system as an end-effector that helps achieve variation in the sounds made by a robot while playing percussion instruments. The proposed method consists of an end-effector that has a mechanism to be inflated. This method focuses primarily on the force exerted while playing a beat by varying the amount of pressure in the inflatable system while playing a beat, resulting in different amplitudes of sounds produced when the end-effector strikes the percussion instrument. By using this mechanism, we get closer to the goal of having robots play instruments with the same amount of variations as a human. The field of art and music brings such challenges for variation, which can act as applications in various other areas due to the level of precision the field demands.