Robot Drummer: Learning Rhythmic Skills for Humanoid Drumming

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shahid, Asad Ali, Braghin, Francesco, Roveda, Loris
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Shahid, Asad Ali
Braghin, Francesco
Roveda, Loris
author_facet Shahid, Asad Ali
Braghin, Francesco
Roveda, Loris
contents Humanoid robots have seen remarkable advances in dexterity, balance, and locomotion, yet their role in expressive domains such as music performance remains largely unexplored. Musical tasks, like drumming, present unique challenges, including split-second timing, rapid contacts, and multi-limb coordination over performances lasting minutes. In this paper, we introduce Robot Drummer, a humanoid capable of expressive, high-precision drumming across a diverse repertoire of songs. We formulate humanoid drumming as sequential fulfillment of timed contacts and transform drum scores into a Rhythmic Contact Chain. To handle the long-horizon nature of musical performance, we decompose each piece into fixed-length segments and train a single policy across all segments in parallel using reinforcement learning. Through extensive experiments on over thirty popular rock, metal, and jazz tracks, our results demonstrate that Robot Drummer consistently achieves high F1 scores. The learned behaviors exhibit emergent human-like drumming strategies, such as cross-arm strikes, and adaptive stick assignments, demonstrating the potential of reinforcement learning to bring humanoid robots into the domain of creative musical performance. Project page: robotdrummer.github.io
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11498
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robot Drummer: Learning Rhythmic Skills for Humanoid Drumming
Shahid, Asad Ali
Braghin, Francesco
Roveda, Loris
Robotics
Humanoid robots have seen remarkable advances in dexterity, balance, and locomotion, yet their role in expressive domains such as music performance remains largely unexplored. Musical tasks, like drumming, present unique challenges, including split-second timing, rapid contacts, and multi-limb coordination over performances lasting minutes. In this paper, we introduce Robot Drummer, a humanoid capable of expressive, high-precision drumming across a diverse repertoire of songs. We formulate humanoid drumming as sequential fulfillment of timed contacts and transform drum scores into a Rhythmic Contact Chain. To handle the long-horizon nature of musical performance, we decompose each piece into fixed-length segments and train a single policy across all segments in parallel using reinforcement learning. Through extensive experiments on over thirty popular rock, metal, and jazz tracks, our results demonstrate that Robot Drummer consistently achieves high F1 scores. The learned behaviors exhibit emergent human-like drumming strategies, such as cross-arm strikes, and adaptive stick assignments, demonstrating the potential of reinforcement learning to bring humanoid robots into the domain of creative musical performance. Project page: robotdrummer.github.io
title Robot Drummer: Learning Rhythmic Skills for Humanoid Drumming
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11498