Singing Robot

The 4DOF CXN-I anthropomorphic robot arm in the Mechatronics Lab at FICES-UNSL (Engineering faculty, San Luis National University, Argentina) was built from scratch, and it is still a work in progress to teach and learn about mechatronics , in order to build another, more robust and precise arm in the future. When one of the students working with the device thought “hey, these motors are quite noisy, aren’t they? let’s put them to work towards something more useful”.

Armed with some guitar tabs, a robot and some noisy servos, [Guille] got the robotic arm to sing a little song raised a couple of octaves, and included it in the introduction video. Because hey, whipping a metal arm around like that is pretty mechanically strenuous, and its not all that great for the servos either.

Join us after the break for a quick video, the singing starts about 58 seconds into the show.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQvWT_AYUX0&w=450]

19 thoughts on “Singing Robot

  1. that was interesting. they should of did a classic and put a conducting baton in it grips. another cool thing is take an old RC car moter and connect that to a stereo.then put the moter on any surface like your head or teeth or desk or wall…. its like those music pops back in the day.

  2. That was more humming than singing – 33 years ago, I had built a bit-slice disk controller for a 2314 type [washing machine sized] removable pack hard drive. My diagnostic would play ‘taps’ on the drive if the diagnostic failed.

  3. @tooth: Please stop abusing the English language! For example, your second sentence should look like this: “They should’ve done a classic and put a conducting baton in its gripper.”
    You should note that “should of” does not exist. It CANNOT be used instead of “should’ve” or “should have”. Also, it is “motor”, not “moter”.

    Apart from that, why should the baton be conductive? I mean… most batons are in fact conductive as they are made out of metal. But one made out of wood would work just as well…

  4. @me.

    Are you serious? tooth meant a kind of mimicry of an orchestra conductor; play a classical music piece and make the robot hold the conductor’s baton. Conductivity has nothing to do with it… I dunno, it made sense to me. :-/

  5. The video could perhaps do with being longer. And might benefit from improved audio. And technically it’s illegal to play anything other than Super Mario tunes on stepper motors.

    Apart from that it’s a win.

  6. omg your all stoopid
    clearly its using stepper engines to produce the music
    but this are no mor impresive than a computerized numeric kontrol(cnk) or a scannar producing music
    it needs more LED BULBS and atleast 3 aredreenos
    nicely designed arm however, even if it cant really produce polyphonic music, hey i have an idea, has anyone made a cnc or a robotic arm or a scanner or whatever that accepts STANDARD MIDI INPUT yet?

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