The anthropomorphic flutist robot WF-4 teaching flute playing to beginner students

The research of the anthropomorphic flutist robot at Waseda University, for more than ten years, has focused on reproducing as best as possible the human organs physiology involved on the human flute playing to clarify the mechanism from an engineering point of view. This research is based on the need to develop useful robots for practical uses in the human living environment. As a result of our research, the newest anthropomorphic flutist robot WF-4 (Waseda Flutist No. 4) with 24-DOF has been developed, which not only improved the expressiveness but reduced also the dimensions of all their mechanisms as closer to human size. In this paper, the flutist robot is used as a tool to help a human professor to improve the sound quality of beginner flutist players. In such a case, the robot is not only used to reproduce human flute playing but to evaluate also pupil's performance and to provide useful verbal and graphical feedback in order to improve his/her performance. Therefore, while robot is transferring the basics of the skill to students; teacher is taking care about how to motivate them (student's psychology). An experimental setup was designed to compare the added value of using the flutist robot for teaching to beginner students against the conventional way of teaching. Students' performances have been analyzed through different methods. The results demonstrated that the performance of pupils were better when the robot was used.