The German company Fraunhofer will present the sketching robot at its booth at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, in March. (Robotlab / Fraunhofer) |
Smile for the robot, honey!
Scientists and artists have teamed up at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation in Germany to create a robot that can draw your picture. In pencil. In 10 minutes.
Robotics and art, you meet at last.
As it turns out, it's actually not that easy to teach a robot how to draw a human likeness. Getting the robot to see wasn't so hard -- this particular robot already had a camera mounted on its arm -- but translating a picture into a sketch proved tricky, the company explained in a release.
The researchers created an edge-processing program that seeks out the contrast in the photographic image and translates those to robotic coordinates, but the scientists had to teach (or program) the robot to understand that not all lines on the human face are created equal.
For example, the team had to write an algorithm that would teach the robot to ignore the tiny wrinkles most of us have under our eyes, but still render the eye shape.
Nobody at Fraunhofer is trying to come up with some sort of serious application for a robot that can draw. And the drawing robot already has a day job.
When not taking pencil to paper, the robot is used to analyze the optical reflection properties of various materials to determine how to make things like the best light reflector for bicycles or children's backpacks.
For this robot, portraiture is just a hobby.
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