HRP 4C humanoid robot learns to sing

‘HRP-4’ by CEATEC

last year, the HRP-4C humanoid robot walked down a catwalk for japanese fashion designer yumi katsura. at this year’s CEATEC japan trade show, the new and improved ‘diva-bot’ has been unveiled with singing as her new talent. developed by the media interaction group at the national institute of advanced industrial science and technology (AIST) in tokyo, japan, the robot utilizes a new technology called vocallistener to mimic a real singer’s tonality. accompanying facial expressions are generated through a system called vocawatcher, which studies a video of a singer to map the facial configurations. the synthesizing technology even picks out the sound and movement of the human singer’s breathing to operate in a more realistic and natural manner.

CEATEC

‘for robots to become widespread in society, I think they need to be used widely in the entertainment industry. as one way of enabling this, we’ve tackled the challenge of seeing how well a robot can imitate a human singer. and that depends on voice and expression. through research like this, we hope the entertainment industry will be able to make widespread use of robots’.  -AIST

the humanoid robot at the 2009 digital content expo image courtesy robot watch

image courtesy gigazine