Robotic Music

Playing Music with KUKA Robotic Arms

One of the most unique aspects of my job as a Research and Teaching Assistant at UTSOA has been the opportunity to work with our pair of industrial robot arms. After learning how to use these machines, I developed an open-source Python library called KUKApython that allows users to write the instructions to control these arms with the Python scripting language. To show off the power of this tool, I wrote a program that takes a music .MIDI file and turns it into instructions for the robot to use to play the song. The purpose of doing this was to get more students thinking creatively about what the robots are capable of.