Flute Playing Robot: From Vaucanson to ABB Arms

A flute playing robot has to do what a flutist's mouth does: blow a thin jet of air across an open hole at the right speed and angle, and shape that jet with its lips. Atsuo Takanishi of Waseda University, who spent years building one, said that "getting even a sound out of the flute is very difficult." This post follows wind instrument robots from Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical shepherd of 1738 to Waseda's robot flutist, Toyota's trumpet band and a semi-automatic flute built at Kumamoto University in 2026. It then looks at where ABB robots such as YuMi and GoFa could fit, and at what still stands in the way.

A Toyota trumpet-playing robot on display at Tekniska museet, 2019. Photo: BugWarp / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Bellows, lips and a mechanical shepherd

In the 9th century the Banū Mūsā brothers in Baghdad described a programmable automatic flute player in their Book of Ingenious Devices, and it may have been the first programmable machine of any kind. The best known early flutist came much later. In 1737 the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson built The Flute Player, a life-size shepherd with a repertoire of twelve songs, and in early 1738 he presented it to the Académie des Sciences. The figure's fingers were too stiff to play the flute properly, so Vaucanson gloved them in skin.

An engraving of Vaucanson's automata: a seated piper with a flute at left, the duck, and the tambourine player. Illustration: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The shepherd played with real air. Gaby Wood, quoted by Smithsonian Magazine, describes nine bellows feeding three pipes into the chest, each set of three pressed by a different weight to give more or less air. The pipes joined into a windpipe that led to the mouth. There the lips could open, close and move back and forth over the hole, while a movable metal tongue started and stopped the air. Johann Joachim Quantz, flute teacher to Frederick II of Prussia, found the flaw: the lips could not move enough, so the upper octaves needed more wind pressure and came out shrill. In 1840 the Italian inventor Innocenzo Manzetti built another life-size flute player, its lips and fingers driven by a program on a cylinder.

Innocenzo Manzetti's flute player of about 1840, its program cylinder and bellows exposed, in a museum case. Photo: Patafisik and Elena Tartaglione / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The modern line starts at Waseda University in Tokyo. Takanishi's lab built its first flutist, WF-1, in 1990 and kept refining the design up to WF-4RIV in 2008. That year IEEE Spectrum listed the robot's parts: acrylic cylinders and bellows for lungs, a vibrato mechanism copying the vocal cords, lips and a tongue made of a thermoplastic rubber called Septon, two cameras for eyes, and arms and fingers, with 41 degrees of freedom in all. The team worked with professional players to define what a good flute sound is, then adjusted the robot's settings over and over until it got close. Later it learned to read MIDI files and play them unaided.

A Marine Corps band flutist at practice in 2011, shaping the air jet with her lips. Photo: US Marine Corps via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Trumpet bands, robot duets and conductors today

Toyota went after the trumpet. In March 2004 it showed a trumpet-playing robot at a Tokyo hotel, where it played When You Wish Upon a Star, and said it hoped to form a robot band for the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi. Toyota's plan for the expo described music robots that could move their artificial lips "with the same finesse as humans" while their hands worked trumpets, tubas and drums. At Expo 2005 a band of eight robots played trumpets and other wind instruments at the Toyota Group Pavilion, a show Toyota Times looked back on in September 2026. The team then moved on to a violin robot, noting that the violin needs even more complex control than a wind instrument.

A two-legged Toyota Partner Robot from 2004 holding a trumpet in a museum display, photographed in 2010. Photo: Motokoka / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Waseda's flutist also learned to listen. In 2009 the robot, which IEEE Spectrum said played with the skill of an intermediate human player, performed a Mendelssohn and Lachner duet with a robot saxophonist, and traded phrases with a human saxophonist by following visual and audio cues. In March 2026 a Kumamoto University team described a semi-automatic flute: fourteen servo motors press every key from MIDI data, so the player only has to blow, and the head joint turns 22 degrees to help with low notes. On 11 October 2026 Xinhua reported that a Unitree G1 humanoid had conducted the Ljubljana Wind Orchestra during its parade in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

A Unitree G1 humanoid, the model that conducted the Ljubljana Wind Orchestra in 2026, on stage at the Japan Mobility Show 2025 in Tokyo. Photo: RuinDig/Yuki Uchida / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

ABB's YuMi has already shared a stage with musicians. In September 2017 the dual-arm robot conducted tenor Andrea Bocelli and an orchestra at the Teatro Verdi in Pisa. In rehearsals, Maestro Andrea Colombini guided YuMi's two arms through his gestures, a method ABB calls lead-through programming, and the recorded motions were then fine-tuned and synchronized to the music in RobotStudio. Playing a flute would be harder, since the robot would need fingers on keys and a controlled air supply. One possible fit is the single-arm YuMi IRB 14050, which ABB lists with seven axes, a 500 g payload and a 559 mm reach. With custom fingertips it could in principle work the keys while a regulated blower did the breathing.

Soprano Maria Luigia Borsi on stage with YuMi at the Teatro Verdi in Pisa, 2017. Photo: ABB

Where wind instrument robots could go next

At home, the first real use is likely to be help for learners. The Kumamoto team built its flute because beginners struggle to control the air jet for low notes, and the fingering robot lets a player concentrate on breath alone. A second paper with two of the same authors, presented at the NIME 2026 conference in London, had the robot start each note from the player's head gestures, tracked by a camera. Players felt more like they had a partner that way, although a simple timer kept steadier time. Waseda also lists music education among the uses of its flutist. A household version would have to be affordable and safe to use close to a player's face.

A woman guides an ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot by hand at a work table. Photo: ABB

Factories are more likely to use such robots for testing instruments. Researchers at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile presented a flutist robot at Forum Acusticum 2023 whose artificial mouth moves around a fixed flute on three axes, with a mass flow controller setting the speed of the air jet. It can change the jet's length, angle and offset one at a time, which the team hopes will help explain instrument design. That suggests a possible role for cobots in musical instrument manufacturing. An ABB GoFa, which ABB fits with integrated torque sensors and rates at 0.02 mm repeatability, could hold an instrument or a test mouthpiece while software compares the sound.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 with test tooling on a refrigerator line at Electrolux. Photo: ABB

Lips and breath are still the hard part. Takanishi's team had to "teach it everything", from lip and finger positions to air pressure, and called it "a very slow process." Each instrument also needs its own hardware, which is why Waseda's goal of one robot playing several instruments was still open in 2009. Cost is unknown: Toyota said in 2004 it had no plans to sell or rent its trumpet player, and the newer flutes are lab rigs. After the Pisa concert ABB wrote that robots are unlikely ever to match the artistry of a skilled human conductor. The same probably holds for a great flutist, so wind instrument robots seem more likely to end up in practice rooms and test labs than in concert halls.

Andrea Bocelli and ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer with YuMi before the Pisa concert, 2017. Photo: ABB

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