beachbot
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Disney's Beachbot is an artistic robot turtle that can draw in the sand
The robotic turtle above can't wield katanas, eat pizza or shout cowabunga, but it can still do something awesome: draw big sand sketches on the beach. It's named "Beachbot" and was developed by a team from ETH Zurich and the Zurich division of Disney Research, a network of labs responsible for some really fun projects in the past year. Beachbot draws on the sand by controlling the pressure it puts on a rake attached to its body: that's the easy part anyway. The real challenge was figuring out how to translate pictures into data the robot can understand, so the team developed algorithms that can turn images into trajectories Beachbot can follow. It's not perfect yet, as they still have to manually tweak the results when working on a particularly big artwork, but they're hoping to make it 100 percent automated in the future.
