Development of the Waseda Saxophonist Robot and Implementation of an Auditory Feedback Control

Since 2007, our research is related to the development of an anthropomorphic saxophonist robot, which it has been designed to imitate the saxophonist playing by mechanically reproducing the organs involved for playing a saxophone. Our research aims in understanding the motor control from an engineering point of view and enabling the communication. In this paper, the Waseda Saxophone Robot No. 2 (WAS-2) which is composed by 22-DOFs is detailed. The lip mechanism of WAS-2 has been designed with 3-DOFs to control the motion of the lower, upper and sideway lips. In addition, a human-like hand (16 DOF-s) has been designed to enable to play all the keys of the instrument. Regarding the improvement of the control system, a feed-forward control system with dead-time compensation has been implemented to assure the accurate control of the air pressure. In addition, the implementation of an auditory feedback control system has been proposed and implemented in order to adjust the positioning of the physical parameters of the components of the robot by providing a pitch feedback and defining a recovery position (off-line). A set of experiments were carried out to verify the mechanical design improvements and the dynamic response of the air pressure. As a result, the range of sound pressure has been increased and the proposed control system improved the dynamic response of the air pressure control.