Toyota Unveils Violin-Playing Robot 203
eldavojohn writes "Toyota has unveiled a robot that can play the violin. From the article: 'Toyota said it planned to further advance the robot's dexterity to enable it to use tools and assist with domestic duties and nursing and medical care. The robot has 17 joints in both of its hands and arms now.' It seems there have been small — or maybe even strange, impractical — advances in robotics repeatedly with demonstrations of robots performing a specialized task. Are we merely struggling to hard code each human activity as we strive for an all purpose android? Is there a chance artificial intelligence & robotics will ever become generalized enough to make interaction interesting?"
Very cool, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Robots will never be be able to match the musical abilities of some humans. There are too many tonal subtleties involved, especially on the violin.
That is still very impressive, nonetheless.
general purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Very cool, but (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Article asks silly questions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Robots perform special tasks better than humans. Surgery is an obvious application, as the summary pointed out. What could be more steady than a hand with hydraulic (or whatever they use) joints. If something is able to play the Violin, it very well may be able to cut you open along a very precise line, remove a cancer/organ/ while the surgeon is sitting on his butt, operating a computer. Surgery is very tiresome from what I understand (I worked in the dept. of orthopaedics in college), and I'd imagine if this is coupled with the proper software and human interface, it would work splendidly for medical purposes.
I'd think the Medical field would be the most interested in this tech. Surgeons could maybe even perform an extra surgery a day ($$$$$$$), and Hospitals usually have big moolah to spend on fancy-schmancy tech.
"small" advances (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the world of research. It takes a lot of work to make small advances like this one. The point of research is to solve specific, difficult problems. I'm willing to bet there were other reasons for this project.
Re:yeah, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Some cars, when parked, ask people to move away if they get too close, so people deliberately get close and try and taunt it.
A new digital media format is released, with a claim to being uncrackable, so it gets cracked very quickly.
So logically, what happens when a robot gets invented that's sole claim to fame is that it won't fall over, even if kicked?
And now we find that even a robot who's sole purpose is to play the violin is going to get kicked too, just to see what happens...
I think i'll invent a line of robots who's sole purpose is to whack you over the head with a cardboard tube if you kick them or other robots over, or just generally abuse technology for your own amusement. Then i'll release version 2 which features a crowbar instead of a cardboard tube. I'll make a fortune selling them as guards for kick-overable robots, vending machines, cars, and DVD's.
Re:Article asks silly questions... (Score:3, Insightful)
They are now. Calculators used to be more expensive than hiring ten people to do the job.
Since we're talking about the distant future, I imagine the thing will eventually be able to fix himself. Or be fixed by his peers.
Re:Very cool, but (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of this demonstration is to show that their robot research has reached a point where they have built a robot with joints that have sufficient degrees of freedom and controllable accuracy that they can do this kind of stunt. You're supposed to look at a robot playing the violin and say "well, if it can play the violin then it can hold a power drill or other tools!"
I'd suggest that maybe they should program the robot to put together some of the crappy furniture you get from Ikea but then people will claim it wasn't cost effective to use a billion dollar robot to do the work of a home handy man or something.
Bold research on comprehensive AI has halted (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything is understanding the nth degree of optimizing Bayesian network inference,
usually applied to a very specific toy problem.
Nothing wrong with that research. Not really knocking it.
But where is the research on how a generally intelligent system could choose what to
focus its inference-engine attention on. Where is the meta-logic about prioritization
and pruning of "trains of thought" depending on success of search and progress
and urgency of need to know compared to other concurrent topics.
Where are the systems that can posit and explore multiple incrementally variant theories
of some aspect of the world, and figure out which theory-variant is a better model of
past and present observations. Where is the system that can take in lots of different
peoples' writings or sayings about things and synthesize an ontology and figure out
whose beliefs are the most promising (truthwise) and relevant.
Where is the episodic memory?
Where is the emotion-tagging of experiences and important generalizations,
and the emotion-guided prioritized recall?
Where are the short-term memory blackboards?
Where is the "utterance" theory and theories for how to inform and motivate
other intelligent agents into execution of a cooperative plan.
Where is the AI just for the sheer wonder of trying to put several techniques all
together and see what emerges?
Re:But can it play... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Very cool, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore much of the work that a musician does involves subtle modifications to the rendition that enhance the clarity of the structure. e.g. microtiming deviations in the melody and subtle tonal inflections are a major part of what makes multiple voices traceable to your perception in polyphonic music -- with strict timing it is *much* more difficult to hear out any polyphonic structure. These effects can be measured quantitatively, by the way, but are far too complex to notate in any score intended for humans to read, and for the most part are too complex for an experience musician to be fully conscious of. (It is possible, however, to program a computer to reproduce them using machine learning).
Finally there is in fact an emotional aspect of music that is actually a consequence of some neural structure or other brain process. This is an active research topic. Likely it is a type of synaesthesia (e.g. mint flavor -> cool sensation). In other words the emotional response to music isn't just the performer "making it up", it's sort of short-circuit in the brain of the listener. Since this is basically a universal effect among humans it would be silly to think that the composer wasn't aware of it as well.
Re:Robot's sense of time.. (Score:3, Insightful)
But what surprised me about the video was that, while the robot's playing was messy, it appeared to make the same errors and imprecisions that new human violin players make. I don't know if I'd be able to distinguish its playing from a seven-year-old's recital if I had to judge by ear alone.
Re:Robotic vs. Human ability (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Robot's sense of time.. (Score:2, Insightful)
- RG>
Re:Very cool, but (Score:3, Insightful)