By developing a robot barber that cuts your hair, inventor Shane Wighton, of YouTube channel Stuff Made Here, has already achieved internet fame. He did nothing more than wait for the robot to do the job, praying that it wouldn’t “form” its face in the process, with its head sticking out of a hole in the middle of the table.
The AI is used by an artist to reproduce the face of Jesus Christ and other well-known characters.
Meet Cardboardizer, an app that allows you to quickly build modular robots.
Using real images, the website produces realistic portraits of fictional characters.
From there, Shane had the idea to build a machine that could carve real images, but instead of trying it with a face, he opted to use Halloween pumpkins. The team’s five-axis system uses two sets of aluminium extruders that move in both vertical and horizontal directions.
Sculpting robot
Shane used most of the components from the barber robot and some 3D printed parts to build his sculpting robot. To achieve a precise fit and allow the cyber artist to act freely, all the moving parts were laser cut.
The creator made several attempts before settling on a method known as a projection marker to “print” 2D graphics on the spherical surface of the pumpkin without introducing visual distortions. To envision how the image would appear on the pumpkin after being transferred to it, virtual modelling software was used.
Finding a truly round pumpkin was one of the most difficult components, as they are quite difficult to locate in nature. According to Wighton, if it was not spherical enough, the robot could cut the wrong pieces, ruining the whole sculpture and producing very distorted images.
Preliminary results were disappointing. Shane discovered that the robotic arm had to be fixed to prevent small vibrations during the printing process from altering the final image and, depending on the angle of observation, giving it a completely crooked and unnatural appearance.
The creator created a special script to check the surface of the pumpkin before starting to cut once the problem was solved. Thanks to this method, the robot was able to accurately carve profile pictures as well as other intricate geometric patterns, displaying all the sculptor’s talent.
I loved Pumkinbot’s performance. The surface of the pumpkin was really carved with photos, but there are still some things to do before he can be considered an artist. A 2.0 version would be fantastic, but I can’t guarantee anything. Scott Wighton
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