[L’industrie c’est fou] CyberOne, Xiaomi’s robotic drummer, has rhythm in its skin

If only he couldn’t get angry like a robot dog Cyberdogits predecessor, CyberOne, the Android robot XiaomiHe has another equally useless talent: knowing how to play the drums. In a video posted on YouTubeYou can watch the 1m77 vs. 52 kilo machine confidently play the beat, albeit slowly, keeping the beat over a pre-recorded audio track.

Concretely, it takes CyberOne three steps to successfully produce such a show. First, it analyzes a midi music file, then it converts it into drum beats, and finally, it generates syncopated tracks of its body. For Zeyu Ren, an engineer at Xiaomi Robotics Lab, the biggest challenge was ensuring that the robot’s limbs, which are all assigned to action sequences, don’t collide simultaneously.

An innovation that will lead to others

But the CyberOne and its battery are only the starting point for research that should be extended to other musical instruments. “We want to define the limits of our robot in terms of hardware and software so that it becomes a reference for next generation design. We have developed a complete set of automated drumming methods for robots to play different songsZeyu Ren explained to IEEE Spectrum. It suffices to be a real orchestra, as indeed, for one of his passages, New Zealand composer Nigel Stanford in 2017.

Before you become a rock star, CyberOne was unveiled by Xiaomi in August 2022. At a communicationThe company praised its qualities. He will be able to lift 1.5 kg with one hand, to perceive three-dimensional space, to recognize individuals, their gestures, emotions (up to 45) and 85 sounds from their environment. It can comfort the user if they show signs of sadness on the user. Xiaomi adds that a humanoid robot is more complex mechanically, and requires more powerful motors, greater freedom, and more comprehensive control algorithms than industrial robots. So these development efforts to give life to CyberOne should have ramifications in other areas in which the Chinese company operates.

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