04.Nov.09 1984’s most advanced robot played the keys
It’s called the WABOT-2 and back in 1984, it was hailed as the most advanced robot to have ever been built. Constructed and designed by Waseda University, WABOT-2 had 50 degrees of limb freedom, controlled by 80 microprocessors structured to mimic the human nervous system. It’s function (aside from speaking Japanese) was to play keyboard synthesizers using both hands as well as feet to toggle foot pedals. It could read sheet music with a camera “eye” and could listen to singing on the fly and adjust its playing pitch and tempo accordingly. All of this over 25 years ago. Mind blowing to say the least.
The video above features WABOT-2 playing a segment of “Silk Road” by Kitaro on a Yamaha FX-1 synthesizer (quite a kick ass instrument by the way).
