Computer Vision News - October 2021

2 Summary AI for A cheology 4 Marcello and his team are not the first to attempt to reconstruct frescoes, but the key differences between this and past approaches are the sheer size of the frescoes, and the fact that ultimately, they are going to physically reconstruct them. “We will build a robot and use soft robotics,” Marcello explains. “Archaeologists were initially terrified by the idea of a robot holding these pieces because if they break one, it risks losing something very precious. So, once the puzzle has been solved, the information is given as input to the robotic platform and the robot uses soft-hand technologies to take and manipulate the pieces very delicately. You can control the pressure and make sure that it is just right for the piece. We’re going to use the experts in a kind of interactive way, to tell us whether the solution proposed by the robot is plausible or not.” Finally, the robot will put the pieces together, but just next to each other. Expert restorers at Pompeii will take charge from there. It is a very delicate process to put the pieces physically back together using techniques that cannot be incorporated into a simple robotic system.