e-David is taking part in the robotart competition. We submitted a portrait painting of Isaac Asimov. Visit http://robotart.org/ and vote for e-David if you like it!

In January a group of artists and students from the MIT visited the
Computer Graphics Group (Prof. Deussen) and evaluated the e-David
painting robot (see www.e-david.org) for different methods of painterly
abstraction. With our painting robot we want to mimic human artists and
find out to which extent painting processes can be performed by
machines. Part of our project is research on computational creativity:
we want to research and develop methods in which the machine starts to
develop its own painting strategies and styles. The machine should be
able to learn from past paintings when producing new ones. Another
important aspect is quantification of abstraction. We want to develop
styles in which we can predict and maintain a wanted degree of
abstraction, technically (number of strokes) and also perceptually.

The MIT students want to use the machine in a semi-automatic way and
combine human  and machine painting. Ideally the human would only direct
the system by sketching and giving hints for the style to be used. Then
the machine does the often cumbersome painting work. At the end the
human finishes the artwork. Benjamin Tritt (http://bentritt.com) is a
well-know American Artist that combines classical painting styles with
modern motives. He is interested in machine painting since large-scale
artworks are very time-consuming and robots might be very helpful in
creating intermediate painting layers.

Benjamin Tritt (right) and Michael DiBenigno discuss with Thomas Lindemeier (left)

The new small e-David is almost finished.

In the past we were asked very often if we could exhibit our painting machine. The first e-David, however, uses a large one-arm industry robot than cannot be moved easily. So we decided to build a new machine with a small robot that can be exhibited. Since the robot (we use a Kuka Youbot) cannot reach all positions on a canvas we combined it with a moveable canvas. This way we can still paint larger pieces and in theory we could even do very large paintings with a bigger xy-table.

We added an e-David representation on google+, here we want to post additional news and images. Check it out!