Hacker News Reader

I agree with you and I'm willing to give them some liberties because they worked a pun into the headline.

It sounded super robotic but I wonder if that was a function of how it was programmed instead of the drumming capabilities of the robot.

View on HN

It's hard to know if they've really solved the problem. It looks suspiciously like they're using a very basic MIDI -> gesture look up table with a very limited range of context-dependent extensions. And no expression or dynamics.

That would make it a toy project, about forty years behind the state of the art.

http://pinktentacle.com/2008/04/video-wabot-2-android-plays-...

It is just using MIDI, and it doesn't look like it has velocity support, that drum kit definitely has velocity clamped to 127 to make it sound more consistent. They claim it's solving whole-body trajectories with self-collision avoidance, which is pretty cool IMO. But I don't really see any sequences in the demo that had any risk of collision and couldn't be done with simpler motion mapping. Show us some rudiments on the toms!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com