3D Printer
If you want a quick synopsis of the current state of my painting robot, this Thrillist Feature captures it perfectly. They somehow made the otherwise dry subject of artificial creativity entertaining, and sometimes funny. I really appreciate all the work of the film crew that worked on this with me and brought out some of the best aspect of this project. Big Thanks to Vin, Joshua, Mary, Peter, Mat, and Paul.
Based on the initial prototype, which we were actually very pleased with, we went back to the white board and tackled some of its shortcomings. The primary issue we had to address was how was a robot arm or xy-table going to hold on to this thing.
That was when Hunter came up with the idea of supporting the entire paint head from the center with 2" bolts. So we redesigned the tray to hold 9 2" 6-32 bolts. Above these bolts an aluminum disk would serve as the mounting surface. With this configuration any module that consisted of a 40 degree arc with a 3.5" radius, could just snap into place.
As always, here is the final Google Sketch file so anyone that wants to can design this along with us.
Hunter and I constructed the first prototype. It consisted of ten physical parts. The tray and nine plug-in modules. If you want to experiment along with us and this prototype, you can download the 3D plans from our downloads page.
Once 3D printing was complete, some parts of the tray were glued together with super glue. The modules could then snap into place and be removed as needed. While we hope the final paint head does not need any glue, we were experimenting with how things fit together and super glue offered us the most flexibility at this stage of construction.
Based on a several lessons learned with the Q prototype, we set out on a number of improvements for the next iteration. The main problem we are now trying to solve is how to suspend The Neural Jet from either an xy-table or a robotic arm.
Nothing makes me realize that The Future Is Now more than our new 3D Printer. We are manufacturing the parts we need for the Neural Jet. And the creative process has taken on an iterative nature. The plan is to have a modular paint head and our design has taken us through seven iterations so far. You can see several of the early wedges that will fit together on our modular head in the pic below.
Some of the attempts went poorly, as can be seen by the tangled mess of plastic on the left. But the design got better as did our proficiency with the 3D printer. Ultimately we ended up with the following version, called Tray G.
As can be seen in the following picture, this tray holds a standard sized airbrush and resevoir almost perfectly. When arrayed in a circle, all the airbrushes should be pointing to a central point, and hopefully be able to paint in unison with one another.
Our 3D Printer, a Wanhao Duplicator I3 Plus, finally arrived from China. Took about 2 weeks to get here. I wanted to open it as soon as we got it, but instead we decided to make an unboxing video. The results were kinda ridiculous. Typical unboxing videos are done by experts, but we quickly realized we didn't know what we were doing and stumbled through ours. But it was a fun way to learn about assembling and putting together a 3D Printer, so we hope you enjoy it.
Though its probably obvious, the name of this new robot is a blend of Neural Nets and InkJets. The main idea being that it will use artificial intelligence to spray paint onto a canvas with jets of air. This initial sketch shows how this will be accomplished with an array of six airbrushes. Final design will include traditional brushes as well, but we will build that around this airbrush array as our experience is that paint delivery is the most difficult part of any painting robot. That is our primary goal, the delivery of paint to the brush and canvas.
Six airbrushes are being used so that a full color gamut can be achieve. The pigments in five of the air brushes will be cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white. The final airbrush will either have a "guest" pigment, or a paint thinner, perhaps water? Not sure yet.
The two most interesting aspect of this are why white and a thinning agent are being included.
The reason for the white is that the Neural Jet will be using creative feedback loops (see my TEDx Talk for details). This robot will need the ability to both add and subtract saturation. Unlike an inkjet printer that knows exactly what it will be printing and uses the white of the page, this robot will be re-evaluating each brush stroke and mark continuously, and repainting areas constantly. As such it will need the ability to lighten areas, and even erase by white washing.
The reason for the thinning agent is many fold, most importantly for brush washing and texture. We are still working out the final details, but this robot will have a brush and brushes need cleaning, so it would be nice to be able to apply pigments and clean them from the brush with this paint head. Another reason for a sixth airbrush is that it might be interesting to have a mystery fluid that simply gets mixed in once in a while to add texture. I am not sure what exactly will be needed, but I just feel like later in the process I will be wishing I had an extra airbrush, so I am including it in the initial design. Hope I don't end up needing two extra airbrush heads.
