Development on an intelligent music score input system — Applied for the piano robot

Besides the controller design for all of the driving motors, it also needs a friendly man-machine interface to input a music score and an action producer to generate the control codes for the motors of the music robot. In this paper, an intelligent music score input systems are proposed to simplify the music score input and enhance the self correcting function for the intelligent control system. Besides the proposed score coding file input, some new input methods including with a touch screen, a foldable piano keyboard and a MIDI file conversion are developed. Due to the limitation of the mechanical system, the piano score should be modified for fitting the specification of robot system. It is a complicated work since the correction must be done by checking the action of the robot playing step by step with the music score. For this reason, an intelligent algorithm is developed to predict the setting time of the response about the palms and fingers and simulate the playing behaviors according with the specification of robot. In order to easily correct the coding file, an instantaneous correcting function is built in the system by showing the current note and beat cycle on screen synchronously with a highlight color and can be paused to correct the music coding while the system is going ahead on the procedure of playing simulation.