IRLP – Maquette

This maquette is being written on behalf of Caleb Wagner, Ben Liang, and Jarod Romankiw.

The interactive robotic light painting (IRLP) has been working on the initial development of our artistic creation. This post focuses on the three main areas of our project, and how they’ve developed over the past week.

Robot

The robot has been purchased and thanks to 2-Day Amazon shipping, we were able to get it fast and assemble it. Cheap components and bad assembly instructions (or lack there of) made building it a little tricky, but it was doable in the end. It’s powered off of one 9-V battery and has 2 motors and an ultrasonic sensor built in. We plan to add more sensors and recievers to help users control it for our final project. In the meantime, we were able to get the robot driving a little so we could do some initial testing.

Human Interaction

We started developing a lightweight app to use as a controller for the robot. This will allow users to control it real-time and use it as a canvas for light painting. We didn’t make much progress on this portion this week, but stay tuned!

Long Exposure Photography

We found a great free tool called Light Paint Live Mercury or LPL – Mercury for short. We had to come up with an innovative way to get a high angle shot and Jarod had some light stands which extend as high as the ceiling in our apartment. This allows a top down view of the floor where the robot will drive. The webcam attached to the light stand is plugged into the computer via a USB and all the controls happen within the program. Using the exposure tool in LPL allows us to control how the image is taken, and wether we want bright or dim effects on the light painting. These images can be saved to the computer as a JPG and seen live on screen.

We don’t need to buy any more materials for this project since we have them all in house!

ItemVendorStatus
RobotAmazonArrived and Assembled
Webcam TripodJarod’s ClosestFully Operational
Lightpaint SoftwareLPL-MercuryFree Software – Installed
LEDs for RobotCaleb Spare PartsNot yet implemented
3D Printed Car Body3D Printer in FoisieNot yet implemented

An our tentative timeline for the rest of the term is as follows:

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