Sponsorship for Student Projects Building Robots that Play a Musical Instrument
NICTA is seeking submissions from academics and students in tertiary institutions in Australia for sponsorship to design and construct a robot that plays an unmodified musical instrument. The project should run during the 2009 academic year and result in a player ready for participation in a contest by November 2009. The musical instrument must be unmodified and the player should be built according to the rules available from NICTA.
Interested parties are invited to send a two-page submission to NICTA outlining their proposed project by 30 November 2008. Suggested projects include the final year projects of engineering degrees, however submission is not limited to that type of project.
Project Proposals
The project proposal should include the names of the involved academics and/or students (if known), an outline of the project, description of the proposed player and a budget. The proposal should not exceed two A4 pages and include the contact details for a principle contact person and associated institution. The project should be aimed at producing a player at a level that would be a credible entry into First Level, Solo Play Level 1, of the Artemis Orchestral Competition. Submissions that feature a cross-disciplinary combination of students and academics will be favoured.
The player should be controlled by an embedded computer system, be less than 20kg and play music from a MIDI file.
Selected projects will need to agree to either placing their robot design into the public domain, via an open source license or similar, or royalty free licensing to NICTA for educational use. Projects will be expected to demonstrate progress over the course of the year and participate in a competition in November 2009.
One of the sponsored projects may be selected by NICTA at the end of 2009 for entry into the international Artemis Orchestral Competition the following year. A condition of project sponsorship is that if selected a number of people from the sponsored institution will accompany the robot to the competition to ensure the best possible entry. NICTA may sponsor attendance at the competition for up to 4 people.
Proposals and requests for further information should be emailed to Dr. John Judge at John.Judge<at>nicta.com.au.
More Information
For more information on format of submission and other aspects of sponsorship including rules please contact John Judge.
Find out more on the 2008 NICTA entry to the Artemis Orchestral Competition, the NICTA/UNSW Clarinet.