Shanghai Tech Writer

Check out this YouTube video! Four Texas A&M students built a robot called Slashbot that plays Guitar Hero on the PS3!

Why is this so cool?

1. I’m a big fan of Guitar Hero!
2. Slashbot is built using National Instruments products!

I’ve been wanting to get Guitar Hero III for the Wii but have not been able to find one here in China. I’ve been tracking the Chinese version of Ebay (Taobao.com) for sellers but apparently, there’s a shortage of the guitars because no one is selling them! Rather, they are selling fake, pirated, cheap, whatever-you-call it knockoff guitars called PEGA that’s 75% of the Activision guitar (the real thing) for 30% of the cost. Not bad for beginner or intermediate-level players, but definitely not acceptable for advanced and expert players.

Slashbot uses LabVIEW and LabVIEW field programmable gate array (FPGA) to program and control the robot to play the guitar.

First, the robot uses an NI PXI system to digitize the composite video signal. Then it uses LabVIEW programming to determine the specific pixels, or “notes.”

This information is passed to the robot actuators, or “fingers,” using LabVIEW FPGA and reconfigurable I/O (RIO ) hardware.

When playing multiplayer mode with a human player, Slashbot achieves the higher accuracy score (close to 99%) but earns a lower overall score. I think this is because Slashbot is not as good about using star powers and whammy bar as a human player.

This goes to show that musicians can’t be replaced by robots, yet. And it’s going to be a long while before any “robot” or “digital” instrument can play/perform at the level of a human musician. I say this because I’m also a musician and I don’t like listening to player pianos or digital pianos. I can tell if the music is “alive” or not.

It’s rather ironic that I like Guitar Hero, a video game version of playing music, electronically.

I like games.

In any case, I love to see and read about how NI products are used in fun, applicable, but maybe not so practical ways. I’ve been a technical writer at NI for half a year now and I still have difficulty explaining NI products to people. Automation, measurement, and testing are conversation-killer topics in my circle of friends. But NI and Guitar Hero? That’s more like it!

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