Forget the beach balls and margaritas – nothing says relaxing day at the beach like robot-created poetry. Designer Yuxi Liu has created Poet on the Shore – an adorable AI-powered robot that rolls around the beach scribbling lines of poetic prose in the sand.

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Liu created the battery-powered robot for her Design Informatics thesis at the University of Edinburgh. The adorable mod cube uses four wheels on continuous tracks to easily and autonomously cruise over the sand. Equipped with an anemometer (a device that measures wind speed) as an antenna, the robot picks up on various environmental factors that are recorded into the machine’s data stream.

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Using artificial intelligence technology, the robot is able to piece together this data to create varying verses of poetry, which are imprinted in its tracks as it cruises over the sand. The robot’s vocabulary is programmed with general grammar and spelling conventions, but is free to arrange the words in any form it pleases.



According to Liu, the robot “enjoys watching the sea, listening to the sound of waves lapping on the beach, the murmurs of the winds, children’s conversing, and the incessant din of seabirds. Most of the time, it roams alone to listen and feel. Sometimes, it writes verses into the sand, and watches the waves wash them away.”

The Poet on the Shore is part of a series Liu created called, “I, Machine”, which explores the “sense, sociability and morality of machines.”

+ Poet on the Shore

Via PSFK







