Pindar will speak about his progress with Zanelle, Van Arman’s painter 'bot. Van Arman has written all software required for her to perform. To create each painting, Zanelle instructs her robotic appendage to make multiple independent design decisions, self-mix up to 24 colors of acrylic paint and apply the medium with upwards of 25,000 intentional brush strokes in a time period of 12-36 hours.

He'll talk about the mechanical aspects of how she paints as well as the multiple neural nets that drive her decision making. He will also discuss plans to introduce a feedback loop that will adjust her painting style as she paints a canvas.

Pindar Van Arman is an artist/roboticist that first got involved in programming during the dot com era. As a graphics artist he noticed all the programmers at his start up were driving much nicer cars than his. In a quest for a nicer car, he taught himself object oriented programming. Shortly after becoming obsessed with programming, he wondered why he had not done it earlier. He expanded into the field of robotics by joining Team ENSCO and participating in two of DARPA's Grand Challenges where he wrote navigation software for DEXTER, Team ENSCO's autonomous off-road racer. Since then he has been working on Zanelle, which paints with an artists brush on canvas.

If you—or someone you know—has an interesting announcement or something to share (5 minutes or less), we'll make time to fit you in.

After the presentations, the exchange continues over food and drink at a nearby eatery (TBA).