Our work on robots with artistic skills, capable of collaborating with humans, is progressing. This serves also as a framework to study human artistic capabilities. After the initial work on AIkon (www.aikon-gold.com) with Patrick Tresset and its focus on portrait sketching and drawing (between 2009 & 2013), we are now engaging in graffiti writing and more generally calligraphy, with the AutoGraff project together with Daniel Berio: www.doc.gold.ac.uk/autograff/.
Early in 2015 we started integrating and implementing models of the dynamics of movements following the works of Prof. Rejean Plamondon (Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal), a pioneer of graphonomics. We are in touch with him and have initiated a collaboration with his team (http://www.polymtl.ca/recherche/rc/en/professeurs/details.php?NoProf=103).
More recently, Daniel and I started to work with Dr. Sylvain
Calinon and his team at IDIAP in Switzerland (http://calinon.ch/).
I gave a talk at IDIAP back in September which gives further
motivation for the approach and how it relates with vision and
perception (work involving also Prashant Aparajeya): http://www.idiap.ch/talk/idiap-speaker-series/past-talks/video/talk-931.html
. Daniel also spent a few months at IDIAP in the 2nd half of
2015 to solidify the collaboration and expand his knowledge in
robotics and machine learning.
Dr. Calinon is a specialist of machine learning for robots and
has had an interest in artistic robots for a long time.
Together with the team at IDIAP we just released a pair of
videos (using the Baxter platform), available from
our main project website (Utube and vimeo): http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/autograff/wp/?p=203
Direct Utube links here:
https://youtu.be/UfFYoRykgTc
https://youtu.be/KU--TOMDDFU
Enjoy! and do send comments, feedback.