Salah is designing an arm for the Ai-Da artist robot

• 22 Mar, '19
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As the world waits to meet the first ever robot artist, IconInc resident Salah, from [The Glassworks](https://www.iconinc.co.uk/locations/leeds-the-glassworks), is working away in his apartment designing Ai-Da’s robotic arm. We caught up with Salah to find out about this impressive project and how he got involved…

Q: Firstly we’d like to know a little more about you Salah. You’re an international student. Can you tell us what country you’ve come from, to study here in Leeds?

Salah: Egypt, I’m Egyptian.

Q: And how long have you lived at IconInc?

Salah: Three years now. I did one year at The Edge and now I’m in my second year at The Glassworks. But I’ve been in Leeds for four years in total.

Q: Which university do you attend?

Salah: The University of Leeds.

Q: And what degree course are you studying?

Salah: It’s called [Mechatronics and robotics](https://engineering.leeds.ac.uk/courses/UG/F543/mechatronics-and-robotics), it’s a three year course. And it’s a very intense course but really well regarded. I did a lot of research about the course and that’s what brought me to Leeds in the first place. I like that there’s a lot of applied work so I’m getting lots of hands on experience. There’s theory too but, in my opinion, the more hands on your course is, the better you’ll be. I’ve done an engineering foundation year too.

Q: Have you always had an interest in engineering and robotics?

Salah: From day one my parents wanted me to get into construction because my dad works in that industry. So throughout my education before university, I thought I wanted to go into construction but then I became more curious about how remote control cars work and all of that. So I was leaning towards electrical engineering, and then I one day I just woke up and was like I want to do robotics.

Q: You’re working on a really cool (and absolutely astounding) project at the moment, designing and building the arm for the Ai-Da robot. Can you tell us a bit about it?

Salah: Ai-Da will be the first robot artist in the world. The robot has several different features like speech etc and I am working on one of those features – the artistic side – with my friend. So the robot will have cameras in her eyes to be able to make eye contact and track the person in front of her. We’re going to take that as an input to our system and basically we’re working on the whole process from seeing a person to sketching that person’s image out. We’re working with computer vision, which is all about face detection and tracking. We’re making a system that will analyse every single pixel in an image (there’s about 700,000 pixels in an image), and then we’re extracting the data we need from that. We’ve developed algorithms to be able to organise how the image is set out and to create a path for the robotic arm to be able to sketch. We write the code, the algorithm, and then we save it onto a mini computer, and then that computer executes all of the code, and controls the motors which drive the arm and make it draw. If you haven’t come across the Ai-Da robot yet, check out this article:

The new Picasso? Meet Ai-Da the robot artist

Ai-Da sketches subjects who pose for her by using her robotic arm and a pencil A microchip in her eye processes the image to draw using Artificial Intelligence The robot is then able to draw what she sees in realistic portraits of her subjects Designer Aidan Meller is working with Cornish-based Engineered Arts, who made realistic robots to promote the HBO show Westworld A British arts engineering company says it has created the world's first AI robot that can draw people by using a microchip in her eye.