Low-Cost Robotic Arm Sketches Faces

ptresset writes "A low-cost robotic arm has been sketching faces at the Kinetica2010 art fair in London. Created by the Aikon project research team, the system drew faces non-stop, its creator having to take the role of an automata to repeatedly change the paper. The Aikon project is based at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The main objective of the Aikon project is to implement a computational system capable of simulating the various important processes involved in face sketching by artists. The ensemble of processes to be simulated include the visual perception the subject and the sketch, the drawing gestures, the cognitive activity, reasoning, the influence of the years of training, etc. It is evident that due to knowledge and technological limitations the implementation of each process will remain coarse and approximate. The system implemented is expected to draw in its own style."

Comments

Court artist?

[MichaelSmith]

Its not allowed to take photographs in courts here in Victoria, Australia so newspapers employ sketch artists to sit in the court and draw portraits of the accused, witnesses, etc.

(you think I'm kidding, don't you?)

Anyway I wonder if you could take this machine into court and claim that it is only doing what an artist would do.

Incidently some of the artists used recently seem to have been influenced by the impressionist school of drawing because the drawings they make don't always resemble the subject.

Re:Court artist?

[clarkn0va]

(you think I'm kidding, don't you?)

No.

Re:Court artist?

[JohnBailey]

Anyway I wonder if you could take this machine into court and claim that it is only doing what an artist would do.

Not if it's like UK courts. The artist can sit in on the trial, but can't draw while in the court room.

Hardware is standard, software unknown

[Animats]

The robot arm is straightforward. It looks like it's built out of Dynamixel servos, which are good little programmable servomotors used for the better end of hobbyist robotics. (After 25 years, finally something better than one-way pulse code modulation for hobby servo control. These things use a 1mb/s bidirectional multidrop serial bus.) There are standard brackets for making robot arms and legs, and it looks like they just bolted the thing together from the stock parts kit.

It's not clear how much the software knows about faces. That's the important part. Considerable work has been done on facial feature detection. There are commercial products available. Most of them ignore hairstyle, though, since they're aimed at face recognition.

Re:Hardware is standard, software unknown

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Animats,

Yes these servos are great...
About the software this version is extremely rudimentary. However it locates the face (opencv), moves the camera to center the face in the frame...
After it locates eyes, mouth, vertical axis horizontal axis...
The drawing is based responses from Gabor filters at limited orientations, scales, etc..
The system on show was the first test program I wrote for the arm. I finished the program during the exhibition. I needed to have it draw people....
The feature localisation is not the most important/problematic part. The most problematic part is to have it to draw. In a drawing the lines represented are not present nor detectable in "reality". They are totally reconstructed.
However the most important outcome from this experiment is that I now have a cheap platform to do some experiments. The next step is for the system to look at what it is drawing.

Thank you for your comments

Best

Patrick

Not mentioned is that he was using linux....

[dopeghost]

I went to Kinetica the other day and saw this and was definitely impressed. What i don't think is obvious from RTFA was that he was running Ubuntu! There were actually 3 individual arms setup, all communicating thru a wireless access point to a laptop he had in front of him. There were even mini postcards he was giving out with a rather dashing interpretation of Alan Turing on it :)