A Robotic Hand Plays the Piano With a More Human Touch

Dec. 19, 2018, Cambridge (UK) . The full paper by Steph Yin. The New York Times

Scientists and engineers have been building and programming piano-playing robots for decades. But there’s something different about a new robotic hand that tickles the ivories with techniques usually reserved for humans.

Rather than relying on a maze of motors, as decades of piano bots have, the hand — introduced Wednesday in a paper in Science Robotics — operates passively, meaning its fingers are not individually connected to any motors. Instead, a simple mechanical arm controls only the wrist, and the rest of the hand follows in a design inspired by human anatomy.