Toward understanding the nature of musical performance and interaction with wind instrument-playing humanoids

The research on Music Playing-Instrument Humanoid Robots (MP-HRs) has a long tradition in the research field of robotics since the development of the humanoid pianist robot WABOT-2 developed at Waseda University (1984). Since then, several researchers have been aiming for the better understanding of the human musical performance. For this purpose, different mechanical designs and cognitive functions have been implemented on them. A particular interest was given to wind instruments as a research approach for understanding human breathing mechanism. Nowadays, different kinds of automated machines and humanoid robots have been developed for playing wind instruments to understand the human motor control from an engineering point of view. Moreover, the importance of studying the ways of enabling the interaction between musicians-humanoid is being attracting several researchers from different research fields. As a long-term research goal, we are aiming to enable wind playing-instrument humanoid robots to display motor dexterities and high-level perceptual capabilities to interact with other musician partners. In this paper, we present our current research achievements on the development of an anthropomorphic saxophonist robot and the implementation of a musical-based interaction system tested on an anthropomorphic flutist robot.