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!
