Learning to Play the Flute with an Anthropomorphic Robot

The research of the anthropomorphic flutist robot at Waseda University, for more than ten years, has focused on reproducing as best as possible the human organs physiology involved on the human flute playing to clarify this mechanism from an engineering point of view. This research is based on the need to develop useful robots for practical uses in the human living environment. As a result of our research, the newest anthropomorphic flutist robot WF-4 (Waseda Flutist No. 4) with 24-DOF has been developed, which not only improve the expressiveness but reduced also the dimensions of all their mechanisms similar to human size. In this paper, the flutist robot is used as a tool for helping to a human professor to improve the sound quality of beginner flutist players. In such a case, the robot is not only used to reproduce human flute playing but to evaluate also pupil’s performance and to provide useful verbal and graphical feedback so that learners’ performances are improved. Meanwhile the robot is transferring the basics of the skill to students; the teacher encouraged them to produce a similar sound as robot (student’s psychology). An experimental setup was designed to compare the added value of using the flutist robot for teaching to beginner students against the conventional way of teaching. Students’ performances have been analyzed with different evaluation methods. The results demonstrated that the performance of pupils were better when the robot was used.