Eduardo Angel Visuals

Robotic Photography.

Like many of you, we have been (spo­rad­i­cally) fol­low­ing the 2012 Lon­don Olympics.  This year, we have noticed that the visu­als are stun­ning. After some quick research, it turns out most of the cam­era work done for the Olympics is actu­ally not done by human pho­tog­ra­phers, but with robot­ics. Footage from the air, sweep­ing panoram­ics, and beau­ti­ful under­wa­ter views are now cap­tured with increas­ingly com­plex remote con­trolled devices.

Robotic Cam­era Rigs

Turns out that for secu­rity rea­sons, the Olympics Com­mit­tee has even banned pho­tog­ra­phers from the sta­dium roofs. Because of this, The AFP team came up with dozens of cus­tomized robotic cam­era sys­tems.  Each rig is equipped with a Nikon D4 and a 16-400mm zoom lens. Watch APF’s fas­ci­nat­ing robotic inno­va­tion process:

Obvi­ously, the Olympics are not the only place where robots are being used to cap­ture pho­tog­ra­phy and video. Robot­ics are essen­tial to research some of the more dan­ger­ous loca­tions on Earth for extended peri­ods of time. A great exam­ple is the Robo-fish, used in north­ern Spain, that mon­i­tors pol­lu­tion lev­els with a sen­sor that detects it, and alerts sci­en­tists right away.

For social research, there is Boxie, a mobile robotic cam­era to gath­ers infor­ma­tion about its envi­ron­ment inter­ac­tively and autonomously.

There are even museum-guide robots cur­rently being designed for peo­ple unable to phys­i­cally visit the facil­i­ties, while allow­ing them to browse col­lec­tions from their home on com­puter screens. This can poten­tially be used as an addi­tional learn­ing tool in schools.

Microsoft is also work­ing on a “party pho­tog­ra­pher” robot that has nav­i­ga­tion and sen­sory capa­bil­i­ties, allow­ing it to move around autonomously, snap­ping pho­tos at events. I very much doubt that the camera’s low-angle per­spec­tive will deliver fashion-quality images, but it is just a con­cept for now (I hope!).

Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity has cre­ated snake robots that climb into patients through tiny inci­sions to oper­ate with far less dam­age to the body than an actual sur­geon would cause in per­form­ing the same surgery.

Lastly, the suc­cess­ful land­ing of the Mars Sci­ence Lab­o­ra­tory a.k.a. the Curios­ity Rover has spread inter­est for the red planet among many sci­en­tists. Watch the Seven Min­utes of Ter­ror video put out by NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­tory to explain why this land­ing on Mars was the great­est tech­ni­cal achieve­ment in robotic space flight in his­tory. Two images have sur­faced min­utes after the land­ing.  Truly incredible!

Robots and pho­tog­ra­phy are here to stay. What do you think?

August 15, 2012: Update – NASA has just released this beau­ti­ful image from the Curios­ity Rover on Mars yesterday.

Fas­ten your seat belts folks!