Painting or sketching from photographs and life, for example, is a technique that is now being mastered by robots. The latest, called eDavid, combines a camera, computer vision software, and a standard welding robot arm to skillfully recreate (in a variety of styles no less) any image you feed its software. It seems that even art, a cornerstone of human ingenuity since the dawn of man, isn't safe from a robot takeover.

 

Though some of the sketches of eDavid (Drawing Apparatus for Vivid Image Display) look a bit like an image run through Photoshop filters, or printed on an old dot-matrix printer, the results will send shivers down the spines of traditional artists.

 

"(We're) working in computer graphics, so we are computer scientists. But we love art and have some projects that are at the border between science and art," says Oliver Deussen of the Computer Graphics and Media Design lab at the University of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg. "With our feedback mechanism we try to mimic the way in which a human painter creates a drawing, a sequence of applying paint strokes to the canvas and then comparing if the color distribution approximates what should be on the canvas."