Although the market for hand-painted portraits has basically collapsed with the invention of photography, it is still a bit magical to see an artist create lifelike images with only pencil, paper and their fine motor skills. Watching a machine do the same thing is also an equally fascinating experience, although the end result is often not so good. In order to make up for this defect, [Joris Wegner] and [Felix fisgus] invented pankraz piktograph, which seems to do quite well in capturing human faces. They were inspired by the classic automatic drawing machine and made a 21st century version for museums or trade exhibitions.
The operation of piktograph is very simple: you stand in front of the machine, look at the camera, and then take a selfie. If you like what you see, the robot will start drawing your portrait on a piece of paper. It uses two humanoid arms made of aluminum and driven by two stepper motors. The ordinary ball point pen is fixed on a spring bearing frame, which provides sufficient pen to paper pressure, and can draw lines reliably without pulling or scratching the paper. We were deeply impressed by the overall appearance of the machine: the smooth, powder coated aluminum shell and stainless steel support itself are a work of art.
Internally, piktograph is driven by raspberry PI 3. The piktograph runs a very complex algorithm to generate vector images. The vector images will not take too long to draw, but will still generate recognizable object images. The manufacturer’s paper explains this process in detail, which uses Canny edge detection to create a contour map, and then fills the blank area to create bright and dark areas. A certain amount of noise and distortion are added to the lines to make them feel more “manual”, and the generated graphics are divided into continuous lines so that the plotter can draw efficiently.
We have seen several special art Robots before. They can draw portraits, draw pictures, and even etch sketches, but the creation of [Joris] and [Felix] seems to have won in speed, workmanship and the quality of the final result. Embed video after break.