Towards Beauty: Robot Following Aesthetics Gradients

Increasing numbers of devices are equipped with cameras generating large amounts of images. State of the art technologies allow to automatically identify relevant and aesthetically pleasing images after they were stored. Here, we demonstrate a robot that estimates the gradient of image aesthetics in its environment and actively navigates towards the maximum. Aesthetics navigation is integrated into a modified robotic lawnmower, switching online between tasks based on estimated aesthetics scores. This behavior generates higher aesthetics scores than offline selection of images captured during standard behavior. The proposed system extends robotic behavior from the purely functional towards a cooperative and empathic level.