Mechanism design and air-pressure feedback control implementation of the anthropomorphic Waseda Saxophonist Robot

The research on the Waseda flutist robot; since 1990, has been carried out as an approach to understand the human motor control from an engineering point of view as well as introducing novel ways of musical teaching. Thanks to the improvements on the technical skills of WF-4RIV, we have enabled the flutist robot to enhance its musical expressiveness. As authors have being developing basic cognitive capabilities on the WF-4RIV; we have proposed as a long-term goal to enable musical performance robots (MPRs) to interact with musical partners. For this purpose, we have proposed two approaches: implementing more advanced cognitive capabilities on the WF-4RIV and developing a new musical performance robot. In this paper, we have focused our research on developing an anthropomorphic saxophonist robot as a benchmark to understand better how the interaction with musical partners can be facilitated. Thanks to our experience on developing the flutist robot, we have succeeded in developing the WAseda Saxophist Robot No.1 (WAS-1), which is composed of 15-DOFs. In this paper, in particular, we present the details of the mechanical and control systems. A set of experiments were proposed to compare the saxophone performance as well as the production of vibrato of the WAS-1 compared with human players.