A robot that plays a real drum kit by watching you play an imaginary one. An Xbox Kinect tracks your hands, a laptop turns that motion into strike commands, and solenoids on a handmade kit hit the drums you were miming.
The problem I picked
Waiting hours in theme park queues drags people out of the world the park creators built — boredom breaks the illusion. Parks have started fighting this with interactive elements in the waiting areas; Disney put video games in the Space Mountain queue for exactly this reason.
DrumBot was designed as a scale model of a larger platform for that job: a consumer engagement device that could sit in roller coaster queues, and also roam the park freely to promote music and engage guests through their whole visit.
How it works
The design brief I set myself was to keep it as simple and efficient as possible.
- Navigation — two motorised wheels plus a caster, with IR proximity sensors and bump sensors so it can avoid obstacles while moving through crowds
- Interaction — an Xbox Kinect tracks the motion of a person’s hands as they air-drum
- Output — those motions are converted into hits on the corresponding drums, with solenoids mounted to the kit providing the force to actually strike them
The chain runs Kinect → laptop for motion processing → BeagleBone Black, which fires the solenoids in real time. Colour-coding the drumsticks to their drums is what makes the mapping legible to whoever is playing it.
Demo day
DrumBot was demonstrated at the Machine Intelligence Lab’s public robot showcase for the College of Engineering’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department on 22 April 2015, and was featured in The Gainesville Sun’s photo coverage of the event.
Photo: Erica Brough / The Gainesville Sun, 22 April 2015.
Video
DrumBot playing along with someone air-drumming in front of the Kinect, demo day 2015.
A second run from the same showcase.
A third clip from the showcase.