reed on here: http://www.elniuton.com/

ICYS TK 5000

Our basic motivation was to build a robot, capable of perceiving its surroundings and reacting accordingly.

These assumptions lead to the “ICYS TK 5000″ robot. It disputes with the ever-growing surveillance in urban space. Everywhere you go, you are being tracked and data is stored. The aim is direct confrontation. How does it feel to be tracked?

ICYS is equipped with a high-resolution camera, enabling it to perceive its surroundings. A custom designed face-tracking software allows the robot to recognize people and produce mug shots. For every spotted person, the robot automatically logs the time and the geo-coordinates via GPS.

The gathered information is printed on little stickers. Those stickers are adhered directly to the ground, thus leaving a distinctive trace of people moving through the city.

Due to the nature of the thermopaper the stickers also have a limited lifespan. The information fades over time because of heat, light and weather.

Technology

For the ICSY TK 5000 prototype we used a vacuum cleaner robot as the base.
It is controlled by two microcontrollers. A small computer inside is responsible for face-detection and printing.

The printing assembly in the base of the robot consists of a hacked GameBoy thermoprinter together with a sophisticated contraption to peel the stickers off the transfer paper and stick them to the ground.

A servo-controlled webcam tracks people’s faces with the help of the “OpenCV Library”. All software for the robot was custom coded.

A project by Torsten Posselt, Tim Horntrich & Benjamin Maus
University of the Arts, Berlin
Digital Class 2008

Progress documentation: http://udk.rgbdeluxe.de/category/icys-tk500/

Some Impressions from the UDK “Rundgang” 2008.

After 5 weeks we finally finished your ICYS TK 5000 Robot. It will be shown at
the UDK RUNDGANG from 18 to 20 July.

So everyone is invited to come to the show.

So after more den 24 hours without sleep here some picture from the night before presentation.
It`s begining with a disaster. We nearly finished the case for the robot but then unexspected all the
paint comes off. But have a look at the pictures, it was really a *#**##* . So we spend half of the night
with repairing.

WE ARE BUSY!

Today we made the first fitting test. So far it looks ok but there is still a long
way to go.

Its also time to introduce the team which is working on this project:

Mr. Maus aka allesblinkt
Mr. Posselt aka verktorjunkie

After a hole day of hard work we finished a second prototype. Surprisingly it
works. So next step is to get rid off some construction mistakes.

After two days of thinking how we can build automatic roll off mechanism for
our printing maschine, we finally found an solution.

So check out the pictures of the first early prototype below.