Engineers create ‘artist’ robot capable of sketching

Giving robots the ability to perform more creative tasks, engineers have created a human-looking ‘artist’ robot that can sketch what it sees via its eyes with a pencil in its bionic hand.

A team at the UK-based Engineered Arts is working together with a British art gallery owners in order to create a human-looking robotic artist with the ability to draw, according to a report by Reuters.

The AI robot named Ai-Da uses a bionic hand equipped with a pencil in order to sketch what it sees. It uses cameras present in its eyeballs to see what’s in front of it and AI-powered computer vision to identify humans, track their features and also mimic their expressions.

Ai-Da will then not only draw what it sees, but also entertain while doing the task. The engineers have equipped Ai-Da with a realistic human face, complete with a silicone skin, moving mouth, blinking eyes, 3D-printed teeth and gums and also a voice to talk and answer questions, as per Engadget.

“There’s AI running in the computer vision that allows the robot to track faces to recognize facial features and to mimic your expression,” said one of the engineers Marcus Hold.

British gallery owner Aidan Meller describes Ai-Da as the ‘world’s first AI ultra-realistic robot artist’. Meller said that the robot ‘is going to actually be drawing’ and that they are hoping to build technology for it to paint.

Ai-Da will make its in-person debut at the ‘Unsecured Futures’ exhibition at the University of Oxford in May. The sketches created by the bot will go on display later this year in London.