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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."
The robot does fine art but the human changes the paper. Something is wrong here.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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Everybody knows that the artists were starving already, and now they are going to be replaced by robots?!
In all seriousness, though, that is a pretty cool device.
There has been too many robot related news here on slashdot. Are the robots taking over the world faster that we expected?
Had one back in 1989.
Not that cool really.
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.
an automata
I don't think that is the grammatical number you think it is.
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There is an exhibit in China Science and Technology Museum that also draws pictures. This is made of four ABB robots, so perhaps the cost is a bit more.. =)
Sorry, I could not find any representative pictures what this exhibit draws.
Store with salt
I misread the title as "Low-Cost Robotic Arm Stretches Faces." That really didn't sound like it would be very fun.
Back in the '80s there were a number of books about building stuff to plug into a BBC micro. One contained a plotter. Unlike the traditional design, which uses two motors to position the pen using cartesian coordinates, this used a double-hinged arm (and, I think, a third one for raising and lowering it; it's been almost two decades since I read the book). You could build it from a couple of stepper motors and some wood and a few wires and connect it up to the BBC. The book contained instructions for things that you could build with stuff from a typical school CDT workshop and also included a full code listing for controlling it. Given the tolerances in typical school technology projects, you'd get quite low precision and the double-radial control mechanism meant that some lines (well, some curves) could be drawn accurately while others couldn't (there was a nice description of the algorithms after the code listing).
Combine that with something that constructs line art from a raster image (which was not really feasible on a machine with a 2MHz 6502 and 32KB of RAM) and you've got something a lot like TFA.
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please look on youtube!!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOtQAhblRps
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 :)
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