My project is to make a rotating light painting with with a robot arm, and every thing works. This week I had the arm draw a low poly bunny again in auto mode after getting permission from professor Putnam. The video below is the robot moving in real-time in auto mode on low speed.
After drawing the pattern again in auto mode I tested illuminating the background of the shop and ran the program at different speeds to see how the increased light level would affect the brightness of the background and the light streaks.
After experimenting with the program speed I decided to run at 50% speed for the rest of the light paintings so the environment would be visible, but not compete with the light streaks for attention. Next, I tested the rotation aspect of the project by stitching together and stabilizing a series of long exposures while re-positioning the camera in an arc sequentially. This was done to verify that this method for creating a video, used before on the regular photos, still worked for light paintings. The same rendering process worked and the result can be seen below.
After verifying that the technique for combining images into a stabilized video still worked I expanded the experiment into the full art piece. After 6 hours of taking long exposure photos every 77 seconds the final light painting rotation is shown in the video below.
The final piece is able to make use of the 3D drawing motion of the arm by showing the series of long exposure photos of the exact same motion produced by the robot arm. However there is room for improvement, the program could be reworked to remove the flicker at the start of the path by having a brief overlap, the process of the generating the program could be automated, and the the tripod movement could by automated. Overall I am happy with the progress on this project.