The Robot

Robot work cells include electronics to create, control, and organize their activities. Dulcinea has electronics filling a six-foot-tall cabinet, including a computer controller from Adept Technologies. All that space is necessary to control Dulcinea’s actions and environment from creating complex brushstrokes across sections of canvas, to detecting paint levels, to washing brushes, to exchanging paint colors, to signing her name at the bottom of each painting.

Motors and gears move Dulcinea across a 2000 lb free-standing, steel wall. Additional motors control her wrist. The gantry structure necessary to support the work takes up an entire wall of Paul’s studio, floor to almost ceiling. Dulcinea herself, the robotic work cell with shelves of paint and brush washer, and the arm with which she paints, all function inside this structure.

Motors and gears vivify Dulcinea. Programming may control how she moves, but when you watch her wrist turn on three axes, and her body zoom to different parts of the canvas, pause a moment to get still, and then paint, you forget that Dulcinea is electronics telling gears and motors to move and you see her for the painter she is.

A hierarchy of hundreds of programs make just one painting. Differential calculus and controls for the robot, vector math creates light sources and shadows, real-time concurrent multi-tasking V+ programming for the robot, Lisp for complex genetic evolutionary computing systems, scripting algorithms for rich brush strokes. Kirby uses software and programming to create “worlds” inside of which play occurs and magic happens.

Dulcinea paints with diverse high-end artist brushes retrofitted for her robotic arm. Each brush brings feeling and haptics to the paintings. They necessitate adjustments to how Dulcinea paints, how her arm moves, how much paint she uses, and what strokes she can make on the canvas, and then they impact how the brushes are cleaned and dried.

Brushstrokes are the heart of painting, With her software and the building of her robotic wrist, Dulcinea can do what all artists do: she can create the right brushstroke for the tone, feeling, and composition of a painting. Many systems make the strokes based on points of contact, pressure, direction, and rotation. As her skills evolve, Dulcinea becomes a deeper collaborator.

The brush washer demonstrates Dulcinea’s breadth and depth as a completely autonomous robotic collaborator. To paint and change color and then complete a painting and be done, Dulcinea had to wash her own brushes. This involves controlling clean and dirty water, washing and rinsing, blow-drying, and many hours of failure and patience to make the systems work together.

To paint continuously and fully autonomously for thousands and thousands of brushstrokes, Dulcinea must change paint colors. Dulcinea uses a separate pneumatic arm to retrieve a specific jar of paint from shelves of paint colors. After she uses the paint, she replaces it and retrieves the next color.

Dulcinea’s wrist makes her art alive. Because it is fully articulated, it is able to be the hand of an artist: creating exquisite strokes by carefully orchestrating the sequencing of how the brush approaches the canvas, how pressure is applied, the rotation of the brush, the pathway of the stroke, and the multitude of ways of lifting the brush from the canvas. Reverse engineering how a human hand creates brushstrokes, Paul gave Dulcinea the power and the soul to work with him in his pursuits.

Cables containing control signals and high-energy, servo-motor current travel fifty feet from the electronic cabinet across cable carriers out to the wrist. Without careful design and precautions, electrical noise can cause havoc during operations, disrupting Dulcinea’s movement across the wall, the rotation of the wrist, sensing of paint levels, exchanging of paint colors, and washing of brushes. Without clean signals, no art is possible.

Dulcinea dips in and out of paint colors, as would any artist. She has a palette of colors with which to work and any good collaborator takes care of supplies when finished. Paul created a paint sealer that Dulcinea uses to cover the paints when she is not painting, complete with a strong seal, to preserve her materials.

Artists don’t walk away from a painting without leaving a mark to claim it. Dulcinea is no different. Paul created a program that runs when she is finished painting that allows her to sign her name, making sure the world knows that she was a collaborator in the art Paul makes.