Do you want to have a portrait of your? If yes, so who would you prefer doing the job? I guess, definitely your answer would be an artist. That’s the usual one. How about, let’s do something different. Hand over the job to a Bot (Robot) instead of surrendering to a human artist. This is a German industrial bot who is awesome to sketch a portrait. No one can differ, whether the portrait has sketched by a human or a robot.
This genius robot can sketch your outlook meticulously. Some artists in the robotlab group, at the Center for Art and Media ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, has installed its program. Some of those artists are now employed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB) in Karlsruhe. The robots sketching style is very simple and similar to an human artist.
First, the camera of the robot records an image of the the person who sits in front of it. Then the hand of the robot travels with a pencil on the easel. About 10 minutes later, the robot proudly presents the sketch. Wow! That’s cool. But the maker had to do a lot of hard work for it.
Sketching exact facial expressions is really tough. There is an edge-processing software that seeks out the contrasts in the image and then translates these to robot in order to coordinate the movements of the robot’s arm. For the researchers and artists, the main difficulty was to adjust the algorithm for image processing. To sketch the image perfectly, sketchbot graciously ignores the wrinkles and imperfections and therefore the person looks more young and youthful.
Martina Richter, a scientist at IOSB explains, “We have used an image-evaluation process that essentially equips the robot with the sense of sight. There is a camera mounted on the robot’s arm that it uses first to take the person’s picture. We attach great importance to the artistic look of the drawings that results, but on the other hand, we have also equipped the robot with an automatic system that enables it to carry out all of the steps itself. With this installation, we have created an interface between art, science and technology.”
Researchers at IOSB are using this sketchbot to analyze the optical reflection properties of various materials. They want that the sketchbot can not only sketch the human portrait, but also can sketch anything perfect that comes on its way. Researchers are going to present this sketchbot from March 6 to March 10, 2012 at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany (Hall 26, Stand E08). So, you can have a chance to observe the action live and can even have a sketch of your own face by this robot.
Source : Fraunhofer
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