“3D portraits drawn by a light-painting industrial robotic arm.”

My partner Jeff Crossman and I are working on getting a industrial robotic arm to paint a 3D, digital scan of a person or object, in full color. The project makes use of a kinect to get the scanned image of a person, and uses Processing to output the points and their associated pixel color. From there we use the plugins Grasshopper and HAL in Rhino, to generate the point cloud and subsequently the robot code. The plugins also allow us to control the robot’s built-in ability to send digital and analog signals, which we use pulse a Blinkm led at the end of the arm at precisely the right time, drawing the point cloud.

GIFS!

Here are some of our process photos as well.