Electronic piano playing robot

In recent years, service robots are widely used for different fields. The fields include house cleaning, entertainment, reception and security. Entertainment has become an important issue for robot applications. In this paper, we design an electronic piano playing robot which can automatically play electronic piano according to a user-defined piano sheet music. The robot has 5 finger hands to play the electronic piano keyboard. There are 2 degrees of freedom in each finger. Stepping motors are employed to rotate finger mechanisms to the desired position. Finger tip are pulled up and down by a steel string with a pneumatic cylinder. A specially-designed controller move the finger tip down to hit the desired key on the electronic piano. If the range of finger movement cannot touch the desired key then the hand will be moved by a linear motor. All fingers and hands can be controlled by the controller independently. Digital I/O PCI card are used to send commands to the controller.