For the past few decades, robotics researchers have focused on Western music with only a handful of attempts to address music from other parts of the world such as South Indian Classical music (a.k.a. Carnatic music) - a music form popular in the southern part of India. In this work, we developed a Carnatic violin playing robot called Hathaani that uses pitch data to manipulate the left hand and amplitude data to make bow changes and modify dynamics. This work bears promise to revolutionize productions in Carnatic music by providing solutions to support gamakas - pitch based embellishments that are at the core of this music form. It can also have a significant contribution to education, by introducing a violin playing robot that can help students understand the nuances of gamaka playing in a repeated and systematic manner. A violin-playing robot can provide a much more accurate and expressive rendition of this music in comparison to software-based emulations.

This paper describes a quasi-passive transradial prosthesis designed to restore drumstick grip control for amputee drummers. A compact motor with low rotor resistance driven by Electromyography (EMG) is implemented in the prosthesis to support real-time drum performances. A variety of grip profiles are achieved by adjusting the stiffness and damping of an impedance controller based on machine learning predictions from EMG data. In addition to the prosthetic design, the paper presents a dynamic model that simulates the drumstick trajectories and estimates the control gains for various natural bouncing patterns. We evaluate the effectiveness of the design through human experiments under real-time performing scenarios for two common drumming grip techniques. The results demonstrate that the prosthetic model can support similar bouncing patterns to the drummer’s healthy hand for single, double, and triple-stroke rolling techniques. The results also show that the system supports usable real-time periodic grip change from single to double-stroke, successfully simulating the common paradiddle drumming technique.