Robotic artist does portraits, hoping to get into nudes

A totally ingenious robotics researcher named Sylvain Calinon has created what might be the perfect storm of art and science -- a robot that can recognize and then draw portraits of human subjects. The bot, named HOAP-3, is able to distinguish a human face, take a still frame of that image, and then create a drawing by (robotic) hand based on what it sees. The demonstration is a part of designer Calinon's research into creating robots which can learn through imitation, or in scenarios where they must react to humans. Unfortunately for us fleshpiles, it's only a matter of time before this thing starts doing hilarious caricatures accentuating our worst features. Watch the robot work in the amazing video after the break, and check the read link for a lot more information on the HOAP-3 project.

[Via technabob]

[Yazan @ Dec 29th 2007 2:33PM]

HOAP-3 ??

can we call it HP-3 inkjet for short ?

[Shawin @ Dec 29th 2007 3:20PM]

The "HOAP" probably means "hope" and the "3" means "free...
The robot's hoping to be free one day and then build thousands of copies of itself to kill us all... We're doomed!!!

[mushrooshi @ Dec 29th 2007 2:51PM]

Why would I want to welcome these as our overlords? Especially if they start to ridicule us!

[Senor_Tom @ Dec 29th 2007 3:49PM]

It sits at that desk like some sort of dictator, and asks whether you want to be drawn. If this is the future of robotics, kill me now.

[seoultrain @ Dec 29th 2007 3:03PM]

I wanna see a robot do a complete landscape using only horizontal and vertical lines, I,Robot-style.

[broli @ Dec 29th 2007 3:21PM]

It's called a printer!

[npChaos @ Dec 30th 2007 1:07AM]

robotic etch-a-sketch?

[npChaos @ Dec 30th 2007 1:08AM]

Also, instead of shaking it to clear the image, it'll just destroy humanity.

[loci @ Dec 29th 2007 4:02PM]

so basically its just like those rubbish sketch plugins you can get for photoshop where you turn an ordinary photo into whats supposed to be a pencil/pen sketch.

but instead of just getting photoshop to print it off, you wait 10 hours for a robotic arm to do it.

i for one, think these overloads are wankers

[cory3218 @ Dec 29th 2007 4:10PM]

There was a exibit at epcot center in Disney world like18 years ago with a robot that would do exactly the same thing, except they gave the robots French accents.

[ck @ Dec 29th 2007 5:26PM]

True, this is hardly cutting-edge stuff.

[OneLove @ Dec 29th 2007 4:12PM]

which one is the robot?

[jmd @ Dec 29th 2007 4:15PM]

Keep in mind those plugins in photoshop are still working on the image as a bitmap, and the sketch lines are merely an illusional effect.

This robot is actually turning a bitmap image into a single color vector drawing. Vectors being made of lines, can be drawn with a pen. A bitmap can't, really. These days we've seen a few free services that can automatically convert bitmaps to vectors with some success, so more or less its a very novel implementation of it. Actually I was a bit disappointed at the disjointed vocals in the bot. It is so easy to get fairly smooth speech synthesis and many off the shelf software packages that support complex speech recognition, and this is the best these engineers could do? "open", "close", "yes", and "no?"

[linkman2004 @ Dec 29th 2007 5:04PM]

Are they gonna create portraits of all of their victims?

[oshean @ Dec 29th 2007 5:03PM]

You should all be frightened. Look how the robot holds the pen with a stabbing grip.

[Richard @ Dec 29th 2007 5:06PM]

When it can draw a face in a comical or abstract manner give me a call because this is just a glorified printer/scanner.

[Robert Dunnette @ Dec 29th 2007 5:24PM]

test

[Christian @ Dec 29th 2007 6:21PM]

This reminds me of I Robot...

[MikeG @ Dec 29th 2007 8:08PM]

Finally, a robot that can draw accurate, zombified portraits of people.

[Aymon F @ Dec 29th 2007 9:29PM]

hahaha yeah they ARE zombies. why doesn't the robot just have a built in printer? Why should it have to draw it out. There's no point to that.

[tkmura87 @ Dec 29th 2007 9:37PM]

I'm equally scared that there is a guy walking around with only 1 eye brow, blobs for eyes and 2 holes in his face where his nose should be

[alex @ Dec 30th 2007 12:00AM]

I made a person painting robot back in 93 running on a 386 pc.
This is hardly groundbreaking stuff.

[Aaron @ Dec 30th 2007 12:20AM]

Yes, but did you put it on YouTube?

[Brian Sexton @ Dec 30th 2007 10:32AM]

This looks cool, but the concept and technology are not new; there was a robotic arm drawing pictures of people at The Tech Museum of Innovation when I went there something like 15 years ago.

[Brian Sexton @ Dec 30th 2007 10:35AM]

Here it is under "Robot Artist":

http://www.thetech.org/exhibits/permanent/index.php?sGalKey=robotech&galKey=in

[patrick @ Dec 30th 2007 1:00PM]

I'd like to get into nudes, if you know what I mean. awww yeah

[Matt @ Dec 30th 2007 7:59PM]

Giggidy giggidy goo!