Senior Capstone Guitar Playing Robot

My senior capstone project was designing, coding, and building a robot to play the guitar. Overcoming the challenge of designing robots for a world built for humans is always relevant to the entire field of robotics, so this project aims to further robotics through intelligent design.

 

Initially, we did research to learn about existing solutions and brainstorm ideas for our robot. We decided on four subsystems: strumming, muting, neck tnaversal, and fretting. The strumming mechanism and neck traversal mechanisms use linear rails to strum the strings and move the fretting mechanism along the neck, respectively. The muting mechanism uses a servo to lightly press and release the strings to mute undesired sounds. The fretting mechanism moves along the neck in an E barre chord shape. It switches between major and minor using a servo. This allows the production of many chords with minimal complexity. 

​

CAD and ordering off-the-shelf parts began in September of 2021. Each mechanism went through multiple iterations in SolidWorks to develop a working mechanism and fine-tune the designs. The irregular shape of a guitar meant that each mechanism needed some tolerance to allow it to consistently perform its function.

​

Code creation began when the mechanism design entered the polishing stage. The code is written in Arduino and stored in a Github repository for collaboration. The code is over 600 lines long and uses 11 functions to simplify the code.

​

Songs can be selected on an LCD screen with buttons. These songs are pulled from a list of pre-programmed songs.

​

The project was highly successful. I worked extensively on the code in Arduino. I created functions in the code to streamline repetitions, as well as creating mathematical estimations to allow the code to robustly play a variety of songs without having to hard-code the specifics of each song.