San Francisco’s favorite piano-playing robotic puppet — niche! — made a return to the spotlight this past weekend for Flower Piano inside Golden Gate Park.
In San Francisco, kids confuse dragonflies for “baby drones.” (Can you blame them — just look at those dinner-plate eyes!) There’s an LED dinosaur that regularly prowls Dolores Park. Open AI has its gorgeous, surprisingly nature-inspired headquarters in the Mission District.
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Suffice it to say San Francisco is by no means a city unfamiliar with robotics (and the neural engines that are rapidly changing the world around us). And unarguably the city’s most charismatic, beloved, charming robot dusted off her mobile piano to hit up Golden Gate Park this weekend for SF’s 2026 Flower Piano.
Vanessa The Robot, who garnered widespread virality after a video of the robot playing Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” backdropped by SF’s Painted Ladies exploded on social media in 2023, was filmed and photographed playing tunes amid the park’s redwoods and colorful flora. Kids swarmed the robot, mesmerized by its puppet-like features and friendly gestures (though one image did show a few small humans either overwhelmed by its programmed talent or horrified by its life-like aura).
The robot, itself, is made up of three assemblies — “the puppet body and two hand movers which manipulate the hands via rods (like a typical muppet),” writes aerospace engineer and Vanessa’s creator, Ben Howard.
The puppet’s human qualities are thanks to a collection of servo motors, collectively controlling six axes of motion — “body forward / back lean, shoulder rotation, head rotation, head tilt, and upper / lower jaws” — and its jaws are pushed in tandem to create a “head pitch,” opening and closing her mouth.
Vanessa’s piano, initially intended to be a simple toy iteration, ended up being a custom one-off design.
“[The piano] was designed to overhang the robot significantly to look as comical as possible,” Howard writes on his website dedicated to his robotic projects. “To enable this it needed to be cantilevered on two legs quite strong in bending. Since I decided at some point to add a linear actuator to tilt the piano up (for navigating narrow sidewalks) it made the most sense for the legs to be welded metal box structures with the actuator inside one of them.”
The piano’s materials are unfussed — a patchwork quilt of CNC-cut plywood and a flexible plywood cover adhered over the ribs to form the curve.
The piano she wheeled and played and won over hearts Saturday and Sunday afternoon, playing her second Flower Piano; Vanessa The Robot held concerts at last year’s summer outdoor concert series, as well.
Lucky for us, we don’t have to walk a thousand miles to see Vanessa’s concerts. At most, we might need to hop on Muni or an electric bike for seven or so miles.
