Xiaomi’s humanoid drummer beats expectations? | Hacker News Reader

Xiaomi’s humanoid drummer beats expectations?

spectrum.ieee.org

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Not impressed.

However, I'm spoiled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7nMZvueKNQ

https://robocross-machines.com/robot-punk-band/

I was expecting this:

https://youtu.be/5UuFqQXWneM

And I was expecting this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lJPgQkN-f8

Compressorhead is such a massive achievement of human ingenuity.

And Compressorhead was a hobbyist-ish project created by some German robotics enthusiasts years ago, yet it was way ahead of what this billion dollar company wants to present as cutting edge robotics. What a joke, I couldn't help laughing watching that Xiaomi video.

Reminds me of the cool stuff that Survival Research Labs[1] used to do in the Bay Area in the 1990s and early 2000s. They'd have very unpermitted and somewhat dangerous shows in abandoned lots in industrial zones and under freeway overpasses. Fun times. Updating it for 2020s robotics, by doing the same thing with semi-autonomous control would be even more wild, and potentially dangerous.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_Research_Laboratories

I expected the epic crystal glass playing contest between Timo Boll and the KUKA robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv6op2HHIuM (after 0:30)

Wow, we've come a long way from the Cereal Bowl Band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNRkA5oOiw

HA! It's like Chuck E Cheese or Showbiz for adult metal heads.

It really doesn’t though. Limited by zero upper body flexibility, all arm motions displayed here are not in any way organic and don’t surpass the capabilities of say, an orchestrion

Doesn't seem like that was the intention?

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.

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!

I was expecting something with some style/personality and the performance in the video was so flat.

I feel like you could script that performance out manually and have it be the same.

I would be surprised if it wasn't scripted, the movements are so angular and linear.

I can only see ML being involved if the ML's interface was an over simplified model with all of the individual movements pre-scripted, i.e only allowing it to decide when to position limbs and onto which drums, but not how, which isn't much of an achievement. It smells of lies and hype. I could be wrong but either way the result hardly looks groundbreaking.

I like this hybrid cyborg approach, which looks more fun, and has much better beats:

Cyborg Drumming Arm Makes Amputee Into Superhuman Musician.

Gil Weinberg fuses prosthetics and robotics to create a drumming arm that can make music that a mere human drummer can't.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cyborg-drumming-arm-makes-amputee-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntrlHw6f4E4

The Android Sisters: Robots are Coming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeerjrFjgT8

> The input for this performance is a MIDI file

So it's not really doing anything except anticipate how long it takes to hit a drum to hit it on time. From this point of view a music box is a "robot".

> From this point of view a music box is a "robot".

A blender is also called a kitchen robot, so it's not much of a stretch.

By who? This is the first I’ve heard of that.

If you Google for it you'll get the gist of it. Wikipedia redirects "kitchen robot" to "food processor", and companies like Thermomix or Dúvida markets their products as "cooking robots" and "kitchen robots".

Google results are personalized, particularly for different locations. I’ve never heard this usage in the US.

When I google “kitchen robot” I get some expensive frozen meal cooker doodad. https://www.suvie.com/kitchen-robot/

Except that, humanoid robot does it more "analog" way.

wow, I was expecting to be blown away considering everything else robot /AI lately and this is....pretty bad? did they have any actual drummers show them how to hit a cymbal at least ?

I mean, the current bar for robotics is at least the stuff Boston Dynamics has put out which is way ahead of this.

Yeah this is about as good as I am at the drums (I'm not good)

you are a better drummer than that. my kid hit better when he was 3.

I find this DIY yellow drum machine robot from 14 years ago much more impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RyodnisVvU

thank you i completely forgot about this cutest of all robots!

So this paragraph summarizes it:

>What was the most challenging part of this research?

>Ren: The most challenging part of this research was that when receiving the long sequences of drum beats, CyberOne needs to assign sequences to each arm and leg and generate continuous collision-free whole-body trajectories within the hardware constraints. So, we extract the basic beats and build our drum beat motion trajectory library offline by optimization. Then, CyberOne can generate continuous trajectories consistent with any drum score. This approach gives more freedom to CyberOne playing drums, and is only limited by the robotics capability.

Nice research, but I'd be more impressed with an online optimizer that only looks ahead about a dozen moves. The point of a humanoid robot is to put them in environments with uncertainty where a limited library of optimized moves won't be enough. Still, AFAICT, it's a fully closed loop from the cameras to the motors so that's nice.

...beats expectations that it would just immediately fall over onto the floor

For your viewing pleasure https://youtu.be/UXHoWNfjJYM?t=315 [5:15]

Spat out my coffee when I saw this ... I guess Xiaomi are pulling ahead ...

Not very impressive imo. Hobbyists were doing better demos 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RBSkq-_St8

Props to the engineers for making it, but it's definitely not optimized for drumming as it fails the very basic technique to correctly use sticks to play effectively and minimize fatigue: you don't play using arms and shoulders, unless you want to become exhausted or even hurt yourself really soon, but wrists and optimizing sticks grip for elasticity rather than force.

This short video will explain it much better than a thousand words:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL1rucJLm0M

For a robot that's not necessarily a problem, the bigger issue is that it's just terribly slow.

[0] Aphex Twin did it first.

-----

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YflPVsh92XU

[1] The guy who makes musical robots for Aphex Twin (Godfried-Willem Raes) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW7RYFBU7E4

Wow the video with Godfried is amazing. What a crazy genius

I must say that was rather lame. Had it played Whiplash or the Buddy Rich Impossible drum solo I might have been impressed.

For as stunningly and embarrassingly terrible as this is, I'm not even sure that the video isn't completely fake. During the flourish just before the end of the video the physical contacts don't seem to line up with the beats at all.

Guy Hoffman (Cornell) does the best robot rhythm section that I know of: http://guyhoffman.com/category/topvideo/

If only Creative Labs had a robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73kd6wsBq0

This robot does bring back the hope the we humans are still required for things to be done right.

It's about the level I was when sat on a kit first time in my life.

There's also some really interesting stuff going on in music informatics, audio and signal processing, especially where everything comes together - accompanying human players:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KE6WhYxuWLk&t=870

I can say I'm much impressed. At the same time I haven't watched Boston Dynamics videos for last couple of years. When I checked latest Atlas demo from 2021 it look like sci-fi to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk

Videos like this really highlight to me how far ahead Asimo by Honda was. It was released in 2000 before any of the deep learning even existed.

I was definitely expecting something a little more dynamic...

But I'm still convinced. Clearly better than real drummers. Ringo is out of a job

Fingers and toes crossed the Tesla Optimus bots will do a complete band and moshpit, and Iggy Pop style crowd surfing.

Those aren’t real drums right? Just digital ones that don’t need as strong a hit?

That is a pretty crappy robot.

Boston Robotics just convened an emergency all-hands meeting ...

"Quick, get that on screen, we might finally find something that makes Grumpy Jeff laugh!"

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