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Monday, November 24, 2008

Snarebot 2008: The Little Drummer "Boy"

The RobOrchestra Snarebot is finding its legs..err arms this year. The project is a few years old and has experienced incremental improvements over its lifetime. This time around we are looking to make a dramatic improvement based on the existing design and input from drumming consultants. We want to make it as realistic at drumming as possible with good dynamics and a pleasing sound.



The old design used two large solenoids pulling on cables to actuate the drum sticks. The wires were connected to specialized rubber holders that had built in compliance to allow the sticks to rebound quickly off the drum surface. These work really well and were one of the biggest components in the success of snarebot 1. What the 'bot lacked was good control over speed and dynamics - since solenoids are either "on" or "off", that's all you could coax out of it. Since there was a single pivot point, it was also impossible to induce different velocities out of the drum strike.



This is the design I envisioned last year - a small, portable device that could fit on any standard size drum. It was actually really neat, and I built a small prototype for the shell and legs. When you rotated the center handle the legs would extend or contract depending on the direction you turned. Since there wouldn't be much force opposing the legs (all downward) they would remain extended and the 'bot would perch happily on the edge of the drum.

This worked pretty well, but only left about an 8 diameter area in which to fit the drum stick mechanism. We found out that short sticks sound really flat since you couldn't get the pleasing resonance you normally hear from a snare drum. The device made had about 4" arm and could hit every 25ms, so speed wasn't an issue.



My sketch for this years' redesign is above. Its larger offset design allows for greater movement and the use of standard drum sticks, so we avoid the resonance issues of the past design. It will incorporate cable drives, solenoids, and servo motors to provide a wide range of speed and dynamics control lacking in Snarebot 1. The drawing isn't exactly to scale as the drum sticks actually stretch across the diameter of the drum, but after taking some measurements I verified the design is doable. Now it's just a matter of finding time to sit down and CAD model it in SolidWorks.

Some people have expressed concerns about latching onto the tuning bolts, but others say we should be fine. I've designed the 'bot this way so that we can eliminate the large clunky stand. It worked out pretty well for Snarebot 1, since you could easily reposition it, but we have something up our sleeves for this design that can accomplish the same thing.

You can't see it from this drawing, but the base will incorporate motorized translation and rotation so the snarebot can target different areas of the drum. Now, we're starting to talk about a lot of motors here, but each RobOrchestra controller board has ~16 outputs, so we should be fine. Hmmm....how about some neon underlighting?

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Who writes This Stuff?
Daniel Shope is the site owner and moderator of DanShope.com, a portal dedicated to robotics and engineering. Dan is currently a student at Carnegie Mellon University and is pursuing dual degrees in Mechanical and Biomedical engineering.

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