Tech

Watch a robot paint incredible pieces of art

Danielle Muoio

2016-02-05T18:53:00Z

Humans may have created all great artwork to date. But the next generation of talented artists may actually be robots.

That's right, robots.

For the last 10 years, Pindar Van Arman, a technology artist and software engineer, has been building a robot that creates art. Van Arman, who is an avid painter, at first built the robot as an assistant for his personal projects.

But now the robot is capable of making beautiful portraits and landscapes, either with the assistance of a human or entirely on its own. Here's a look at the robot's stunning work:

Here the robot begins its work painting Gandhi.

A human can trace the outline of a photo on Van Arman's website, and the robot will do the actual strokes on canvas.

The robot has a head capable of holding a paint brush and moving it in different angles. It can also clean the brush on its own.

"It can mimic the style of painting," Van Arman told Tech Insider. "If someone dabbed a lot, it would dab."

And the final results are stunning.

Van Arman has steadily improved the robot over time and is currently working on the fifth iteration.

Before working on creating a robot with artistic capabilities, Van Arman assisted Team ENSCO in the DARPA Grand Challenge in building a driverless car in 2004.

"I worked on the self-driving car project and it raced across the desert at 80 miles per hour," he said. "I liked that we were designing something that could drive itself, but I couldn't afford a car so I started looking around for things I could do at home."

That's what led him to build the robot, which can also use artificial intelligence to complete a painting on its own.

The robot will take a picture of what it wants to work on, such as a photo of Abraham Lincoln, and will make a "difference map."

Essentially, the robot will look for areas on the canvas that differ most from the original picture. For this reason, it will usually start filling in dark colors (like grey and black) before lighter ones since they differ most from the white canvas.

Van Arman recently entered it into a contest that seeks to find the most talented robot artists.

The Robot Art contest will take submissions until April 14. Participants can win as much as $30,000 in the contest.

For the contest, Van Arman will allow hundreds of people to assist the robot in painting several portraits.

When no one is painting, Van Arman will leave the robot's autocomplete mode on, which allows it to paint entirely on its own based on the strokes the last person used to create a portrait.

Here's a, well, interesting painting of Queen Elizabeth II that was made with the assistance of another person.

"Queen Elizabeth was a funny one because someone got on there and decided he/she wanted to make her look like she was a time traveler," Van Arman wrote in an email to Tech Insider.

But some people took the portrait a bit more seriously.

Van Arman says a common criticism of robot art is that it isn't really art, but a sophisticated copying process.

For it to be art, "the robot has to have something that wasn't intended emerge," Van Arman said. "The robot has to recognize something as cool and change its own goal."

But Van Arman pushes against that criticism saying even professional artists execute their own algorithm.

"[Jackson] Pollack used to talk about how he liked to define serendipity," Van Arman, who went to graduate school at the Corcoran School of Art in D.C., said. "But he was executing an algorithm just as much as my robot executes an algorithm."

"He would drip paints and step back and look — he had this big process, but it was an algorithm," he continued.

Van Arman argues that its this process that allows you to recognize famous artist's paintings that you've never seen before.

"You don't have to see every Monet to recognize it," he said.

"Making this creative machine has made me realize I'm not as creative as I once thought I was," Van Arman said.

"My machine is much more talented at art than I am — not as creative, but talented," he said. "The question remains to be seen if it will become more creative."

Art