Paint by Numbers: Artist uses custom-made robots to paint

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02:29

Technology applied to art, several times a week American artist Barnaby Furnas visits an art lab at a Manhattan printing company. The lab houses custom-made robots that Furnas uses to enhance or make portions of his paintings. Take a look.

Furnas uses the rover robot named "Sozo", custom-fitted for him with a brush that flicks paint on a canvas to mimic splashes of blood.

Furnas gives instruction to Sozo via a paintbrush-style rod attached to an optical tracking system, by waving the rod in the air as if he were an orchestra conductor.

BARNABY FURNAS ARTIST "I literally think of that robot as a friend. More than a pet, less than an art assistant, somewhere in there."

The rover robot can drive across a large flat surface and make marks under the guidance of a painter. It can move horizontally and vertically, and be fitted with different types of tools such as an airbrush, a regular brush or a scraping tool.

Two on-board computers send hundreds of instructions per second to the different motors that send data about the location of the robot, while a third remote computer interacts with the system to send commands given by the artist.

This is made possible by an optical tracking system adapted from a commercial virtual reality system matched to the rod held by Furnas and the rover on the floor.

During every painting session, each movement is recorded and stored, allowing the robot to redo an effect, or recreate portions of a painting on a completely new canvas, becoming a real life 'control z' function for the artist.

BARNABY FURNAS ARTIST "I can go back and just do half of what I wanted it to do. So it offers me all these kinds of, it lowers the risk threshold for individual mark making."

It also allows Furnas to be more creative. For instance, the rover painted thousands of individual hairs on a bison painting.

On another painting called "The Trio" which depicts three identical women screaming in a farm setting, Furnas only painted one face in the center of the piece, while a robot painted the other two women with exact precision. A human painter could never achieve the same level of accuracy, enhancing the painting's mood.