Mathias Franzius, "Towards Beauty: Robot Following Aesthetics Gradients", International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR) , 2019.

[Publication on SPLESH project] 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. We show that such behavior generates better results than offline selection of images captured during standard behavior.