Imitating the human flute playing by the WF-4RII: Mechanical, perceptual and performance control systems

In this paper, the main improvements of the mechanical, perceptual and performance control systems, implemented on the Waseda Flutist Robot No.4 Refined II, are presented. Each of the systems of the flutist robot has been designed in order to imitate as near as possible the skills displayed by human during the flute performance; as a mean for clarifying the internal processes of the human motor control to perform skillful activities, enabling the robot to express ideas/feelings in musical terms, and proposing new ways of interaction between the human and the robot. A set of experiments were proposed to verify the effectiveness of the perceptual system as wells as the proposed volume control algorithm implemented on this robot. As a result, the robot has demonstrated to be able of recognizing automatically melodies from the performance of flutist beginners, detecting and tracking the presence of a human face and performing with more expressiveness by controlling the sound volume