As we gather data in an attempt to recreate the style and brushstroke of old masters with Deep Learning, we thought we would show you one of the ways we are collecting data. And it is pretty simple actually. We are hand painting brushstrokes with a 7BOT robotic arm and recording the kinematics behind the strokes. It is a simple trace and record operation where the robotic arms position is recorded 30 times a second and saved to a file.
As can be seen in the picture above, all Hunter had to do was trace the brush strokes he saw in the painting. He did this for a number of colors and when he was done, we were able to play the strokes back to see how well the robot understood our instructions. As can be seen in the following video, the playback was a disaster. But that doesn't matter to us that much. We are not interested in the particular strokes as much as we are in analyzing them for use in the Deep Learning algorithm we are working on.
Woman With A Parasol is the fourth Masterpiece we have begun collecting data for. As this is an open source project, we will be making all the data we collect public. For example, if you have a 7Bot, or similar robotic arm with 7 actuators, here are the files that we used to record the strokes and make the horrible reproduction.