Disney robot draws giant patterns in the sand

We've seen robots capable of painting. But Beachbot works on a completely different level. The machine, developed by a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of technology and Disney Research centre in Zurich, can create large scale sand drawings. Of course, its not go to any comparison with stories of the Crimean sand artist Kseniya Simonova, but demonstrate new possibilities of robotics.

Chief researcher, Disney Research Zurich Paul Beardsley said he wanted to create a robot-artist who could write the unusual pattern. Instead of paint he decided to use sand.

Painting on the sand is ideal, because this canvas can be used an infinite number of times, quoted by Beardsley edition of IEEE Spectrum.





Beachbot has an integrated computer module, Wi-Fi, a inertial measurement unit (ISS) and the laser scanner. The four lighthouse in the sand set the boundaries of the canvas. The robot builds a coordinate system, and locates your position in it. All his movements are carried out with millimeter precision.

While all this may seem simple, the construction of the Beachbot was associated with some difficulties. Team Beardsley tried a lot of drawing tools, before he settled on rake mechanism with separately administered teeth that can leave sand prints in the form of strips of different thickness.





Engineers also experimented with the wheels, traces of which would not be clearly visible in the sand. But the most difficult part of the project was the work on creation of algorithms to convert the original image into the path of movement of the tricycle Beachbot.

The original image can be created on a mobile device, and then transferred to the robot. Painting in the sand is written about 10 minutes.

When writing a scale drawings need to manually adjust the trajectory of the robot artist. In the future the researchers hope to fully automate this process.

While Beachbot draws on canvas size 10 x 10 meters. But, according to its creators, if necessary, the working area can be increased to a kilometer, which is a decent part of the beach.

My dream is to paint in the style of the Nazca Lines — shared Beardsley.

Source: hi-news.ru