Engineer John Judge creates robotic clarinet player

CREATING a robotic clarinet player is a clever thing in itself and winning an international competition with it deeply gratifying, but the strategy behind it is even neater: John Judge wants to put the National Information and Communications Technology Australia's Centre of Excellence on the global map.

CREATING a robotic clarinet player is a clever thing in itself and winning an international competition with it deeply gratifying, but the strategy behind it is even neater: John Judge wants to put the National Information and Communications Technology Australia's Centre of Excellence on the global map.

NICTA's entry won the June competition with its performances of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee and Ravel's Bolero, beating a Dutch-designed robotically driven guitar. The clarinet player was rated bestbecause of its realistic sound and the complexity of its mouthpiece design, which demonstrated the capabilities of embedded systems.

"We are a relatively young organisation," said Dr Judge, who is a senior research engineer at the Government-backed NICTA.

Entering the orchestra competition run by the European-based Advanced Research & Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems Association was an attempt to benoticed.

ARTEMISIA was founded in January 2007 by European companies DaimlerChrysler, Nokia, Philips Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Thales to bring private-sector researchers together with the European Commission and its members to foster developments in embedded systems.

"So many things now have embedded systems, from mobile phones to whitegoods, which raises the problem that the cost of continuing improvements is more than one company can bear," Dr Judge said.

NICTA is interested in collaborations and partnerships that make use of its research, but the first step is to make people aware of the centre's expertise.

"We get to have our name out front of all of these people and we become well known, and by winning we become a well-respected entity too," he said of the competition.

"We have some Australian technology we want to push."

Having won the ARTEMIS orchestra competition, NICTA wanted to keep its commercially important profile high.

"NICTA would like to continue entering the ARTEMIS orchestral competition, but it's not really our core activity, so we would like to sponsor some university projects."

Hence it had created a competition of its own: a pilot version this year invited entries from the University of Queensland (another clarinet player) and the University of Adelaide (a violin player and possibly a concertina player).

Next year it will be extended to other universities and NICTA has called for academics interested in creating devices to play instruments to make submissions, with a view to funding the successful applicants to the tune of $5000 to $10,000.

The target contestants are final-year engineering students.