Low-Cost Robotic Arm Sketches Faces 93
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."
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but you are just a first-post-waiting bot. Not impressed.
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but you are just a first-post-waiting bot. Not impressed.
The system first posts non-stop, its creator having to take the role of an automata to repeatedly refresh the page.
Stop the future, I wanna get off (Score:5, Interesting)
The robot does fine art but the human changes the paper. Something is wrong here.
Re:Stop the future, I wanna get off (Score:5, Funny)
The robot does fine art but the human changes the paper. Something is wrong here.
I have to do that for the office photocopier too. Its been that way for years.
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If porn industry augments this fantastic new technology and attaches a fleshlight too it ...
You can get off!
Court artist? (Score:5, Informative)
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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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?)
That may be dumb, but it's not as dumb as blurring or pixelating the sketches when they're shown on TV in Australia. (No, I'm not kidding either).
Only really bad artists need apply.
Re:Court artist? (Score:4, Informative)
(you think I'm kidding, don't you?)
No. [google.ca]
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I thought that was the idea. Given that the suspect is currently presumed innocent, they deserve a little privacy and don't need to be recorded in the media in a way that associates them with a crime.
misunderstanding (Score:2)
There are some misunderstandings with the article. This [engsoc.org] is the robotic arm in question. And "Sketch" is Austrian slang for "pulverize."
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It's the same in the UK.
An undoctored photo can't be unrepresentative of the "action" but a sketch must always be subjective. I suppose it avoids distractions caused by photographers moving around and the attendant flash. With a photographer roaming, you could even end up with the ridiculous state whereby the court "poses".
Perhaps a series of hidden cameras is the solution ...
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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.
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It's like that too in the Netherlands. Sometimes it leads to rather unwanted exaggerated results. For example this one:
Real person - convicted but almost certainly innocent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_de_Berk):
http://www.luciadeb.nl/luciana/Lucia12-wijst-op-kwal_ORI.jpg [luciadeb.nl]
Sketch (note for example the nose):
http://www.destentor.nl/multimedia/archive/00904/Zaak-Lucia_de_B__wo_904785b.jpg [destentor.nl]
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I find it so ironic that a minority of powerful humans are far more likely to be a threat to us all than the machines, but I guess thats been the case throughout history, regardless of which era and level of technology we look at. Its not the tools and machines, its what an arrogant minority of people do with the tools, that will be, and has always been the core problem.
'Twas ever thus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite [wikipedia.org]
Thanks a whole fucking lot, boffins... (Score:3, Funny)
In all seriousness, though, that is a pretty cool device.
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robots made by 3rd-world slaves who get 30-cents-per-hour.
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Computer facial recognition (Score:2)
for a big brother application you would just need a high enough correlation to be passed to a human for final judgement.
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The algorithms used in facial recognition are mostly quantitative in nature. They find unique numbers given by the proportion of various facial parts. Whereas this robot's algorithm is much closer to a Photoshop effect, an irreversible image filter. Given slightly different angles of the same face, the robot would draw vastly different pictures (talking about line placement only, yes, they would look similar to us humans)
But... I like the idea that some day there will be thousands of robots furiously sketch
Wassup with all these robot stories of late? (Score:3, Insightful)
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An unlikely extension (Score:2, Interesting)
Also known as a plotter. (Score:2, Insightful)
Had one back in 1989.
Not that cool really.
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I think plotters are cool. They're like vector graphics at its finest.
Hardware is standard, software unknown (Score:5, Informative)
The robot arm is straightforward. It looks like it's built out of Dynamixel servos [trossenrobotics.com], 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 [seestorm.com] products [omron.com] available. Most of them ignore hairstyle, though, since they're aimed at face recognition.
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However, on the up side this easy to model and calibrate, so if you can predict the load, you can add a feed-forward term to the position command so the servo moves to the intended position. (i.e. add the amount of expected error to the command so the final position is correct)
Alternatively, or in addition,
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Maybe it's because it makes it look more "organic". If it would draw the lines in an optimized order, people would understand what this is: A photoshop effect and a line plotter.
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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
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It is far from impressive, really (Score:2)
I saw this robot at Kinetica. It was not very impressive. First of all, the hardware seemed poorly designed. It was incredibly shaky. When it drew a square around an image, the result were four wobbly lines that did not even connect.
The software, of course, is the more interesting part - and a complete mystery. They had a screen showing a program doing edge detection or something similar on a face. They had a camera that was supposed to capture visitors and draw their portraits. Other than that, nothing was
Someone needs a proofreaders (Score:3, Funny)
an automata
I don't think that is the grammatical number you think it is.
I'm half impressed (Score:2)
The technical challenge is pretty interesting. I like to see tasks completed by a physical analogue. The art is pretty sketchy, though. I've seen "pencil sketch" photo booths in the mall that make prettier artwork. Those have the advantage of going straight from the converted photograph to a printout of course. When they figure out how to let a machine do shaded sketches with a stick of charcoal, I think that this will be ready to jump from technical oddity to marketable novelty.
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Call me ancient, but... (Score:2)
The 1980's called. They want their pen plotter back.
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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 th
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Ok, I guess that makes it more interesting. :)
But the question, then, is as such: Is it cheaper to use a craigslist/ebay pen plotter and make it less precise in software, or to build an inherently imprecise robot arm that (ostensibly) produces the same sort of result?
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Reprap Addition? (Score:2)
Been there done that (Score:1)
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They took our jobs! (Score:2)
First came stealing the assembly person's job in auto factories. Now they're stealing the jobs of artists. What's next, a robotic president?
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The problem is that the robots are owned by the companies.
Imagine everyone would own a robot, and those robots were then rented by companies. Then the robot would do the work, but the owner would get the money, without working himself.
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I have better things to do with my life than working.
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That would be the goal, but it is anti-capitalistic. Those who own the robots shall reap the profits.
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Yeah, just like cameras and photocipiers stole the work of artists too.
The robot is a tool, and may need some form of an artist to program or operate it. It's no worse than going from baking your own charcoal to using a modern pencil.
There are non-low-cost exhibits like that... (Score:2, Interesting)
There is an exhibit [abb.com] 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.
I thought the article was about facelifts. (Score:3, Funny)
I misread the title as "Low-Cost Robotic Arm Stretches Faces." That really didn't sound like it would be very fun.
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Exceeded the limited bandwidth ...Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
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The comparison between how the robot sketches faces and the various other "how to sketch faces" instruction videos that YouTube helpfully provides is interesting. It looks like the robot is using some sort of priority algorithm for deciding the next stroke that has no concept of either the current stroke or the basic features of the face itself.
So while a human sketch artist builds a face out of a library of pre-defined components that are effectively parameterized by the particular individual being sketch
OTHER site about AIKON (accessible) (Score:1)
What would impress me (Score:2)
I'd RTFA, but it's down...
What would impress me would be if it did facial recognition to find the face, then tried drawing using the arm, compared the drawing to the image and adjusted as it went until it was finally graded 'acceptable' by a human, at which point it would lock down its algorithm.
Mirror. (Score:2)
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:bXLtSTi8_nMJ:www.aikon-gold.com/+http://www.aikon-gold.com/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=mozilla [74.125.155.132] ...
Not mentioned is that he was using linux.... (Score:3, Informative)
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Low cost robotic arms? (Score:1)
I guess the real news here is that there are low cost robotic arms.
Looks painfully slow (Score:1)
Looking at the video, I would guess that it's doing some edge detection, stitching edge pixels into chains, and drawing each chain. However, the chains seem to be drawn in arbitrary order, and the robot arm spends most of its time "seeking", pen up, to the start of the next chain. It would have been nice to optimize the drawing order to get faster output. Hell, a human would have drawn the sketch a lot faster.
Of course, obtaining the optimal sequence is equivalent to the traveling salesman problem, but t