The current growth of technology has allowed us to create a cooperative alliance between robots and humans, covering a wide range of services and needs to satisfy the client and remain present in the global market. Industrial robots have already entered this era, proving to be useful tools in different processes.
The new generation of robots are better prepared, managing to be incorporated into artistic applications, and over time artists are looking to focus on new techniques combined with technological innovations such as AI, developing software and algorithms that fit each required movement, with the ability to use sensors that will allow them to react to their environment, analyzing each piece of data provided by the trajectory to ultimately give the robot the ability to create a work of art. That is, that the robot can learn the technique to perform this task.
This is the case of the mechanical engineering student at the University of Sydney, Wenzheng Zhang. In love with the art of Chinese painting and robotics, he decided to manufacture a robot that could produce a traditional Chinese ink painting, an original style known as guóhuà.
This artist began experimenting with a robotic arm in college. In a mechanical engineering class, he came up with the idea of combining fine arts and robotics, creating a robot with the ability to produce a traditional Chinese ink painting; using traditional Chinese art techniques.
Zhang worked with a universal UR5 robot, two brushes, ink, art paper and an easy integration application consisting of an open source called Python. Zhang clarifies: “The code must be as flexible as possible for two major reasons. One is that there are too many parameters to be controlled, and some of these are not controlled for this project. Another reason is that these parameters should be adjusted by the computer to achieve a certain sense of creativity.”
The artist developed the program with the purpose of designing an original work of art without having to imitate other works of art. This system, created by the young artist, uses a method of images that define the displacement of the figure, using a link between mathematics and geometry. This project draws small figures by way of training and then moves on to painting more complicated figures.
Paul Brizzo, Wenzheng Zhang’s supervisor at the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, says “the robot is an important step to unite these two very different disciplines. Zhang’s work is of great importance because it is an exciting initial example of the fusion between two traditionally opposite fields, engineering and fine arts.”
He also believes that the robot manipulates a group of commands based on a set of collected data that are considered important for a painter, such as the size of the brush, the ink, the water and the paper.”
The combination of new technologies with other different processes is a huge help for difficult tasks and needs to be met that are presented on a daily basis, but they also motivate us to research and develop new systems that help us achieve the unattainable.
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