Italian conductor Andrea Colombini said of his student, "The gestural nuances of a conductor have been fully reproduced at a level that was previously unthinkable to me. This is an incredible step forward, given the rigidity of gestures by previous robots. I imagine the robot could serve as an aid, perhaps to execute, in the absence of a conductor, the first rehearsal, before the director steps in to make the adjustments that result in the material and artistic interpretation of a work of music." Yumi is not the first computer artist. In 1973, professor and artist, Harold Cohen created a software program called AARON – a mechanical painter.

The Japanese robot-maker Fanuc has teamed up with the computer technology specialist Nvidia to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to robotics to boost productivity and to bring new capabilities to automated factories. The partners will use AI to give robots the ability to teach themselves to perform tasks faster and more efficiently, and to work together, so that a task that would previously have taken one robot eight hours to complete, could now be done by eight robots in an hour. The robots will be able to learn on their own, instead of being programmed painstakingly--for each function they need to perform. The technology is based on --deep learning"--software, accelerated using Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units), which will support AI in the cloud, in data centres and embedded in devices. The AI will be implemented on Fanuc--s Field (Fanuc Intelligent Edge Link and Drive) platform, which combines AI with edge computing to process --edge-heavy-- sensor data from machines to allow them to collaborate intelligently and flexibly.