Toyota Robot Violinist Wows At Shanghai Expo 121
kkleiner writes "The Shanghai World Expo got a special treat this past week in the Japanese pavilion, when Toyota's famed violin-playing robot thrilled the crowd with a rendition of the Chinese folk song Mo Li Hua (jasmine flower). The bipedal artificial violinist hasn't been seen much since its debut back in 2007. Now we have footage of the Toyota bot playing Mo Li Hua in Shanghai as well as its original rendition of Pomp and Circumstance from 2007."
Robot band (Score:4, Informative)
They also have one that plays the trumpet: http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/special/robot/ [toyota.co.jp]
And backup dancers.
Re:Shareholders (Score:3, Informative)
Methinks big Japanese corporations are legally obligated to use a small part of their budget (say 1%?) for humanitarian purposes. Toyota may have many robotic divisions, but the one I'm familiar with is the Partner Robot Division, and there's an Assistance group there IIRC. It's what you think it is: assistance robots, to help in the care of elderly and disabled. The violin thing is just PR and probably was done by a couple guys who thought "hey, we can do *that*", and got green-lighted. It all comes from that same division.
Toyota has an annual one day employee festival at their combined ECU electronics/robotics plant -- a former site, IIRC, of a Denso plant. It's on the outskirts of Toyota-Shi. That's when they actually open the gates to the public. If you can figure out when the festival is, you can just go there and see the demo of the violin robot. The spot where they demo it used to be literally a hole in the plywood wall to their temporary robot development floor. Last year they moved the division to a big new building, and surely they give the demos there. The demo was a multi-channel motion playback preceded by running the alignment procedure. AFAICT, they did use some force-feedback controllers, but those were just that -- controllers being fed a pre-set motion reference. Not very high tech, although definitely they had very nicely done mechanicals.
Re:Shareholders (Score:4, Informative)
Methinks big Japanese corporations are legally obligated to use a small part of their budget (say 1%?) for humanitarian purposes. Toyota may have many robotic divisions, but the one I'm familiar with is the Partner Robot Division, and there's an Assistance group there IIRC. It's what you think it is: assistance robots, to help in the care of elderly and disabled. The violin thing is just PR and probably was done by a couple guys who thought "hey, we can do *that*", and got green-lighted. It all comes from that same division.
The Japanese government has an official policy of furthering the development of humanoid robots [meti.go.jp].
Every industrial giant in japan has invested in accordance with that policy (there's tax credits IIRC), and the trend that I observe is that they all decided to concentrate on one aspect. Honda concentrated on the legs, Toyota on the hands, others are working at facial expressions, etc.
I gave a link in an earlier reply to Toyota's robot page, you can see they had a wheeled robot with nimble fingers back when honda had a walking robot with claw hands. They're competing against each other on details but cooperating on the bigger picture: Japanese domination of the humanoid robot market.
Re:wow (Score:3, Informative)
I'll be impressed when it sounds better than a mediocre high-school orchestra player. I was actually surprised at how poor of a performance it gave--the idea is neat, but I expected them to have something more polished before putting it in front of an audience.