Toyota's Trumpet Playing Robot Showcased

fsharp writes "The New York Times has an article discussing the first public showing of Toyota's new humanoid robot. During a demonstration, the biped robot played trumpet together with a rolling robot. Most telling about the article was the whole philosophy towards R&D: 'Toyota acknowledges that it is unlikely to turn a profit building robots anytime soon, but the program highlights its engineering-oriented culture and willingness to invest in projects that may not pay off for decades.' How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?"

Alternative Article

[luxis]

http://cooltech.iafrica.com/technews/309033.htm [iafrica.com]

Google it baby...

[_PimpDaddy7_]

Here you go link [google.com]

Reg-Free Link

[_bug_]

Registration free link [nytimes.com]

I wish article authors would at least put up some effort to find and use reg-free links when possible.

BBC article

[g-to-the-o-to-the-g]

Heres a link [bbc.co.uk] to the BBC article.

Re:A heckler from the 18th Century

[curtisk]

seriously MOD PARENT UP!, that guy made a flute playing "automaton" [wikipedia.org]that had about 12 songs back in 1737

Lots of companies support crazy R&D

[Ephboy]

In addition to Toyota's trumpet player, both Sony and Honda have developed robots that run/dance/etc., that they have no hope of immediately recooping the expenses on. And look at the DARPA Grand Challenge that happened this weekend, several of the teams were run directly or indirectly through tech companies (and you can be sure they weren't in it for the $1M). Even the non-corporate teams received tons of donations of equipment, sensors, vehicles, etc to support the crazy dream of driverless car in the desert.

see it walk

[omar.sahal]

See it walk here [toyota.co.jp]

Re:Alternative Article

[luxis]

Ooo.. found the real homepage :

http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/special/robot/ [toyota.co.jp]

Re:Very cool, but..

[Nakito]

It sounds as if it may be cool, but I wonder if these robotic lips are really as advanced as the article suggests, or if instead some kind of shortcut was taken. I was a music major and I played a brass instrument (french horn). Brass instruments do not have a reed or any other artificial source of vibrations. Instead, the performer's own lips are the source of the vibrations. The performer essentially generates a highly-controlled "raspberry" by constricting the muscles that surround the mouth and buzzing the lips while pressed against the mouthpiece (so the sound of a brass instrument is really just an amplified raspberry, artfully done). This is hard enough to do by itself, but it's made even harder by the fact that brass instruments embody the open harmonic series, which means that the peformer can play many notes without changing the valve settings just by adjusting the tension in the mouth (think of a bugle). One of the things that makes a brass player competent is the ability to hit the correct harmonic without cracking the note (also known as a "clam"). It's very hard to get it right consistently. If this robot is really doing all of this, plus pressing the valves, plus articulating the correct attacks and rhythm, and doing all of it well enough to play "Trumpeter's Holiday," I'm impressed!

Re:Very cool, but..

[Strudelkugel]

How many companies these days are willing to drop money into some technology that may not turn a profit for many years?

Here's one: Microsoft

Re:Very cool, but..

[drinkypoo]

Here's another one: IBM. Big Blue has been behind so much of the scientific grunt work, a great deal of which has consisted of conceiving of and building experimental scientific equipment [about.com].

The robot runs linux!

[donniejones18]

EETimes article [eetimes.com]

Each robot uses a Pentium III processor as the main CPU along with a Real Time Linux OS. NEC supplied a customized lithium ion battery, which powers the biped robot for about 30 minutes.

Re:Very cool, but..

[drinkypoo]

The scary part is that it's really not that hard. Even radio-controlled cars do regenerative braking. And, it's easy (relatively speaking of course) to build a small displacement, high compression engine which runs very efficiently in a short powerband, and combine it with a motor/generator system with a regenerating anti-lock electric braking system (plus electrically-pumped ABS friction brakes, since at low RPMs the motors will not work as brakes and will require an unacceptable expenditure of energy to stay in one place.) Using brushless motors means that essentially the only parts you will have to replace are batteries (a real issue) and axles/half-shafts (when the CVs fail.) This technology scales both up and down nicely, the only problem being that you have much of the cost of both an electric and a gasoline vehicle. No plan is perfect :) As for why we are buying the technology, it's probably because they're giving them a good price on the stuff. It's not like it would be that hard to make it, everything in a hybrid car is a known problem, except how to not make it look lame. (I know, I know, don't remind me about the hybrid civic, then I'd have to tell you what I think about civics. And I know about Dodge's "failed" $85,000 hybrid durango.)

And yeah, where IS solar? Dag nabbit.

Honda's AISMO can conduct music!

[antdude]

Honda's AISMO robots can conduct music. See these two articles: #1 [honda.ca], #2 [andante.com] , and #3 [latimes.com] (registration required). It played Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to the public). I would like to see Toyota's trumpet players in the next concert!

BTW, does anyone have video clips of AISMO conducting? I cannot find any. :(

Re:Very cool, but..

[joggle]

AFAIK, they are semi-autonomous in that they can navigate over and around obstacles from point A to point B without being explicitly told to do so.

Link to robot site and movie

[guacamolefoo]

Toyota's robot site is here [toyota.co.jp]. It has movies of the robot. Evidently, they won't put out one with the sound because of copyright issues. I was really interested to hear it play, since I play the trumpet myself.

GF.

Re:Very cool, but..

[Tiro]

Has more to do with devaluation of the dollar than import tariffs.

As far as your second point, the part about us not being able to sustain free trade with the Third World/Global South, it remains to be seen whether the West will be able to sustain extracting the surplus wealth produced in the Third World/Global South as it has for the past several hundred years. Those who take Marx's position believe such surplus wealth extraction is possible in the long term (although resistance and collapse would eventually result), but Adam Smith's arguments concluded that wealth imbalances would even out. A fair amount of research into this is ongoing [see esp. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism.

Gas Prices

[Zilfondel2]

Actually, gas prices are not at an all-time high.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/gasprices/FAQ.sht ml

Toyota Technological Institute

[stardazed0]

The Toyota Technological Institute [tti-c.org] at Chicago is another example of Toyota investing money in basic research (in this instance, computer science). The institute employs a number of full-time permanent research faculty, supported by a $100 million endowment.

Re:A heckler from the 18th Century

[Cecil]

No offense intended to flute players out there, but speaking as someone who has played both instruments, it would be several orders of magnitude harder for a robot to play a trumpet than a flute.

Woodwind instruments in general tend to prize consistent, solid airflow to make their music. This is ridiculously easy for a machine to do and do exceptionally well. The design or the reed is what does the conversion from airflow into sound.

Brass instruments are an entirely different animal. 90% of playing a brass instrument is in the lips. If you blow straight through a trumpet, nothing happens. You get a whooshy air sound coming out the other end. If you don't buzz your lips together to get a note, you get basically no sound at all. You tighten the lips to go up to a higher note.

It is significantly more impressive that a set of robotic lips have the articulation and control to be able to play the trumpet.

Re:Very cool, but..

[BZ]

1998 figures on military budgets (from http://www.cdi.org/issues/wme/spend.html):

US $265 billion
Russia $48 billion
Japan $45 billion
France $38 billion
UK $33 billion
Germany $32 billion
China $32 billion

Yeah. No military to take up financing. Just 1.5 times the military budget of the UK.

Japan has one of the largest and best-equipped armies in the world, in fact . It's just called a defence force and theoretically prohibited from taking offensive action by the Japanese constitution.

They don't exactly spend it on weapons...

[kahei]

Japan's military budget is huge, but it's so oriented toward providing jobs for key voters and corporate welfare that it makes the US look like a lean mean efficiency machine by comparison. Of that huge defence budget, less than half goes on things with any direct connection to actual fighting -- and even what is spent on maintaining combat units is mainly a matter of keeping Japanese people out of the unemployment office at high (ie Japanese) wages.

Really, military spending is not the same as budget figures. It would be better to say that Japan chooses to route more of its corporate welfare through the defence area than the UK does, and that it cares more about keeping people with no useful skills employed than the US does.

Re:Very cool, but..

[arivanov]

Well, you are right to be pissed off but for the wrong reason:

This marketoid shit has nothing to do with Toyota R&D because in fact Toyota R&D is done by companies in Toyota group which operate under a different brand name.

Example: Toyota engine research is done largely by Daihatsu. As a result for the 1.3 VVTi engine. Toyota: 170+g CO2/mile, Diahatsu (60% owned by Toyota and in fact manufacturing all the engines): 135-g CO2/mile, Toyota: 87 bhp, Diahatsu: 106 bhp.

Another example - hybrid vehicles. Compare Toyota Prius with the recent Daihatsu prototypes shown at Tokio motor show. The difference is not just striking. It is mindblowing. On one side you have a piece of shit that delivers worse pollution params then a big standard petrol car from the same group (compare Prius and Sirion SL or R series), and on the other side you have something that blows your brains out in terms of fuel efficiency (around 100 mpg).

Basically, if you think that american companies have succumbed to the powers of marketing instead of doing engineering you have no idea of what Toyota is inside. After all it is the same group that sells one car as Lexus in US, Toyota in some other countries and Daihatsu in Japan. I would not say which model - do some web searching to find out :-)

Re:Very cool, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, gas isn't at an "all-time high." It's nowhere close.

The national average price for regular, unleaded gas in 1980 was $1.13. That's $2.54 in today's dollars (with inflation and buying power taken into consideration). The EIA figures for today peg the national average at $1.74.

The reason you see all those monster vehicles on the road (Navigators, Escalades, H2s, etc) is because gas is cheap. Hybrid and Electric vehicles will not be successful in America until the Average Joe really can't afford to drive a personal tank to pick up his groceries.

You're selling Wall Street short (har har). If a company has a good balance sheet and is reliably profitable, the market could care less about the duration of their investments. What do you call a company with an atrocious balance sheet and no profits? Anything with an 'e-' in its name circa 1999. :)

Re:Very cool, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually they were making these weird ass giant "jukebox" music machines around the turn of the century that did just that. Automota that played real instruments. Several are on display at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin. They sound like crap, but they work. So really, this isn't that much of a stretch.

http://www.thehouseontherock.com/music_machines. ht m