AGH UST releases a ukulele-playing robot

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Tracks from the Godfather, Pirates of the Caribbean or Requiem of a Dream – listen to these  well as many other melodies played by a robot constructed by AGH UST students. The concept known as the Ukurobot has already received significant international media attention.

The design and construction of the Ukurobot was carried out by four students of Mechatronic Engineering at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics: Jakub Grela, Adrian Gołąb, Mateusz Guzik and Łukasz Jurczak. The authors, who  conceived and developed the machine as part of their course in Mechatronic Design, were inspired by a guitar-playing mechanism built from Lego Mindstorms. The young engineers set out to construct their own robot with more advanced design and mechanics, which – apart from playing chords and plucking all strings simultaneously - could also play individual sounds.

The wooden casing contains 16 servomechanisms – twelve of them press strings  while the other four – pluck them. This allows the robot to play a large number of pieces of music. The instructions received from a computer are transferred to the device via Bluetooth. Thanks to the desktop application, which was the students’ concept developed in .NTE technology, the robot can play individual tunes, chords as well as complete melodies, and as such is both a musical instrument and a music player.

Only three months passed from the moment the decision to build the robot was taken to it playing its first melodies, yet some development work is still on-going. The team of creators has numerous ideas for improvements to the design. These include using 3D print technology, extension of the application to add new options for programming music as well as increasing the number of servomechanisms, which would mean a larger choice of melodies the robot could play.

Films with the robot’s performances can be watched on the Ukurobot Channel (Youtube). The device developed at AGH UST has been also covered by international media, including several Internet portals like: Digital Trends, TechCrunch or Hackster.

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