The First Cyborg Drummer

3-Armed Drummer Makes Becoming a Cyborg Look Pretty Cool
‘Envisioning a world in which humans become robotics-equipped cyborgs doesn’t mean that all the enhancements will be Borg-like weaponry — there’s room for some artistically-focused augmentations too.

‘One of the first of these new creativity-inspired add-ons is a robotic drumming prosthesis, a device that turns a two-armed human drummer into a three-armed super-powered percussion machine…’
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How I fell in love with the drums
‘…Unbeknownst to me, my mom and dad would give my first drum set at age 11 and my first drum lesson at age 12. I have been in love with rhythm and the drum set ever since then.’

‘Clayton Cameron is a drummer who is perhaps best known for his brush technique. He got his first big break as the drummer for Sammy Davis Jr.’s big band. He then began a longtime collaboration with Tony Bennett, recording 15 albums with him and touring with him for the same number of years. In 2012, Cameron released his debut album, Here’s to the Messengers: Tribute to Art Blakey. Read more about Clayton Cameron on his website. And watch his talk, embedded above. It gives a (snare drum) crash course in the math behind rhythm…’
TED

Would you Trust Robots Over Humans?
The scary thing about autonomous systems is that it could be hacked to do dangerous things
If you want to trust a robot, look at how it makes decisions
‘…When we deal with another human, we can’t be sure what they will decide but we make assumptions based on what we think of them. We consider whether that person has lied to us in the past or has a record for making mistakes. But we can’t really be certain about any of our assumptions as the other person could still deceive us.

‘Our autonomous systems, on the other hand, are essentially controlled by software so if we can isolate the software that makes all the high-level decisions – those decisions that a human would have made – then we can analyse the detailed working of these programs. That’s not something you can or possibly ever could easily do with a human brain…’
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The Most Agile Robot
But still not good enough to beat humans
‘Are robots destined to beat humans at everything? Maybe not or at least not yet. Chinese industrial robotics company Kuka hosted what may be the first-ever man versus robot (arm) table tennis match and finally revealed the results in this video.

‘Kuka’s Agilus robot arm, took on German Table Tennis champ and former number one player in the world Timo Boll on March 11. Unfortunately, the match wasn’t streamed live. Instead, the China-based Kuka filmed the match for a commercial and then sliced and diced it into the final cut you see above. Much of the action is in slow-motion, which may be because Boll and Kuka’s Agilus move too quickly to be caught on a camera running at regular speed…’
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