ThamRobot: An Automated Robotic System to Play Thammattama

Sri Lanka has a precious traditional drum music culture that is mainly based on traditional drums. At present, this drum culture is in decline due to a lack of talented drum players. As a result, many Buddhist temples are facing a serious and tragic problem. This article presents the design and implementation of a robotic system named ThamRobot contains two robotic arms that were designed to play pre-programmed three drum tunes of the Thammattama correctly and efficiently like a drum player without any intervention of a human. In the research, nine major characteristics factors of the Thammattama such as music notes, drum locations, approximate stress, frequencies, pitch, drum type, number of sticks, playing technique, distance from stick to drum face were identified. The entire system is comprised of four main modules named motion module, user-operation module, processing module, power supply module. Finally, the system has been tested in a laboratory environment and encouraging results were obtained.