As the race to bring humanoid robots into the workplace and the home heats up, manufacturers are often keen to show off newly learned skills and accomplishments. But none so far rock as hard as keytar wizard Adam from PNDbotics.
Though not specified in the promo materials, the version of Adam that appeared on stage as key melody maker with Hu Yutong's band at the recent VOYAGEX Music Festival in China was most likely the company's SP configuration.
This 1.67-m (5.5-ft), 62-kg (136-lb) model has up to 44 degrees of full-body freedom and 340 Nm (250 lb.ft) of joint torque, and sports five-digit robo-hands. The Lite flavor has a rubber-like ball at each wrist, and though the U variant does sport dexterous hands, it features an upper torso and arms mounted to a wheeled base.
In order to make the humanoid fit into the look of the band – and possibly not to frighten youngsters given its skeletal T-800 vibe – PNDbotics dressed the robot in a loose-fitting hoodie, cap and face covering.
As you can see from the performance above, the sequences handled by Adam weren't particularly complicated and were definitely pre-programmed – while also being monitored live by a support team – rather than a cool autonomous robo-jam. As such, improv masters like Jordan Rudess and Jesús Molina have nothing to fear at this point. But the the key-punching sections in the video fit really well into the look, feel and sound of the overall song. And as a PR exercise, it was probably priceless.
The company's platform is available to developers looking for a "modular, stable, and AI-powered humanoid robot" and benefits from an open-source SDK and "advanced AI algorithms." There's support for NVIDIA's Deep Reinforcement Learning environment, as well as imitation learning, for easy access to Isaac Gym training. Adam is also built around proprietary modular actuators with force control.
In the works for a couple of years now, the Adam humanoid is still at the prototype stage of development. It looks like the first configuration out of the gate will be the U model, in partnership with Noitom, and will be officially launched at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in September. Pricing for that one starts at US$45,000 – but PS prototypes are already listed online for $100,000.
If you'd like to explore more robotic music performances, check out the following samples dredged from our archives. First up is former metal band Compressorhead, then all-round entertainer Shimon, followed by desktop LEGO musicians, and finally the warehouse-smashing industrial sounds of Automatica. Or perhaps AI creations are more your thing, such as Dadabots and the Velvet Sundown.
Source: PNDbotics
