Humanoid robot: Draws for fun not pennies
I've long held that robots would one day take over all the menial tasks done by humans today (actually borrowed the view from movies). And looks like I would be right sooner rather than later (again movies). So in comes a robot that is designed to replace people etching out living by making portraits.
Sylvain Calinon, Swiss researcher on robot programming by demonstration, has designed a neat humanoid that draws likeness of anyone who is kind enough to stand in front of it. The working is quite simple. As soon as a person enters within the bot's purview, it snaps a digital image. Then the Robot Artist extracts the major characteristics of the image and plots them neatly on a paper. Proceeding methodically, it first plots the outer lines and adds details therein.
And it does all this using an old-fashioned quill pen that it repeatedly dips into ink. What the...? I mean you'd expect better from a robot. How about a laser pen, for instance?
Check out the bot in action in the video.
Anyways, I don't know if it's only me, but that's not a very neat portrait by even my modest standards. It seems that this one's not taking over artists' work, just yet!
