cloudpainter Hardware Complete - 2 Robotic Arms and 5 Airbrushes

cloudpainter, as we currently imagine it, will have two 7bot robotic arms and five airbrushes on our Neural Jet painthead. The canvas will be on a track and move up and down between the painting tools.

We are thinking that when a painting begins, the Neural Jet will use its airbrushes to paint a quick background.  

Then the canvas will be moved up to an area where the robotic arms can use artist brushes to touch up the painting. If it needs more airbrushing, it will move back to that area, back and forth as needed.

There is still a lot of fine tuning we need to make to the hardware to make all of this possible.  But at least we now know the direction we are heading in and we can begin to write the software.

Deussen & Lindemeier's eDavid

A couple of years ago a video started spreading that showed an articulated robotic arm painting intricate portraits and landscapes. This robot was named eDavid and was the work of Oliver Deussen and David Lindemeier from the University of Konstanz. While many painting robots had proceeded eDavid, none painted with its delicacy or captured the imagination of such a wide audience. 

While the robot had remarkable precision it also seemed to have an artistic, almost impressionistic sensibility. So how did it go about creating its art?

When speaking of eDavid's, Deussen and Lindemeier see its paintings as more of a science than art. Their hypothesis is that "painting can be seen as an optimization process in which color is manually distributed on a canvas until one is able to recognize the content. - regardless if it is a representational painting or not." While humans handle this intuitively with a variety of processes that depend on the medium and its limitations, eDavid uses an "optimization process to find out to what extent human processes can be formulated using algorithms."

One of the processes they have nearly perfected is called feedback loops, a concept I use with my own robots and first heard about from painter Paul Klee. It is where you make a couple strokes, take a step back and look at them, adjustment your approach depending on how well those strokes accomplished your intent, then make more strokes based on the adjustment.  You do this over and over again until you finish a painting. Simple concept right? And almost mechanical, but it is how many artists paint.

So to emphasize how well the robot has become at painting with feedback loops, I leave you with my favorite eDavid creation.  Not sure what its title is, but how can you deny that the painting below looks and feels like it was painted by a skilled artist.

Robotic Arms, and The Beginning of cloudpainter

So we have long realized this, but now we finally have a plan.  For this painting robot to truly be able to express itself, it needs arms.  So we are planning on adding a pair, if not four.  A conceptual 3D model showing where we would put the first two can be seen below.

So the way we are thinking about this whole robot coming together is to add a pair of robotic arms above the painting area.  They would hold brushes, or maybe a brush and a camera.  Still deciding on this.  But as currently envisioned, the XY table will control the airbrushes, and the arms will control the traditional artist brushes.  Lots of reasons for this, least of which we think it will look cool for them to dance around each other.

We expect to have one of the robot arms, a 7bot, here in a couple of days.  Can't wait to see what we can do with it. 

Another thing we are realizing is that this is beyond the scope of the Neural Jet.  This new robot, a machine with a modular paint head on an xy-table and two robotic arms, is sort of a new project.  So from here on out while the Neural Jet will refer to the modular paint head, the project in its entirety will be referred to as cloudpainter, and will encompass all the tech and algorithms from all of my previous robots.