It’s the end of July and we had our first meeting to decide that we would kick off the Neural Net Project on August 1, 2016.
Our teams goal is to create a painting robot that uses a variety of mark making devices to create art on a canvas. We want to finish this new robot within a year. This will be our family's sixth painting robot, and easily our most ambitious. It will use many of the algorithms that we have experimented with over the years, including some new ones, in an attempt to have the robot make all of the aesthetic decisions for each piece of art it creates. Our goal is for this robot to create art in as human a manner as possible.
In our kickoff photo, Dante can be seen holding one of the first robotic heads (left) while Hunter is holding a half-constructed prototype of our newest one (right). Pindar is in the middle holding Corinne. While we have not yet decided upon many of the details behind this new robot, you can see a lot of our prototyping equipment in the background including a custom built xy plotter, couple of Arduinos, and a Lego Mindstorms set.
We will be updating this blog regularly with our progress as well as sharing all our code and design as the robot progresses. We encourage anyone interested to join in on this experiment.