Dan Bau (or Đàn Bầu in Vietnamese) is a very unique Vietnamese traditional instrument. It is often called the Vietnamese monochord zither. The instrument has only one string with warm sound.
We are developing a range of robots that can play Dan Bau:
- a robot designed specifically for playing Dan Bau
- a set of universal robotic arms trained to play the instrument
- a humanoid robot that can play the instrument.
Regarding the first line of the work, i.e. the robot that designed specifically for Dan Bau, we have completed our first version of it that can play a musical sheet written for Dan Bau in MusicXML notation.
Its hardware parts are built specifically to play Dan Bau. Its software employs some AI techniques, such as reinforcement learning, to learn to play the instrument by itself.
Here is a video demo of the robot
In the second line of the project, we are developing the robot named DBV1 as a combination of two 6 DOF arms and training them to play the instrument. One arm plucks the string, and the other bends the rod to modify the sound.
The current work is focusing on developing and testing the algorithms in the simulated environments. See the collection of the performance by DBV1 here
The third line in this project is to develop a humanoid robot that can play music on Dan Bau. The work is in progress and we will update you soon. Stay tuned!