When I visited London last year I didn’t know I was going to see the world premiere of the very first robot acting as an artistic real-time assistant. It just happened by accident and I loved it! Sadly I haven’t had the time to write about it, that’s why I’m doing it now.

‘Long Distance Art’ was a project created by the Viennese artist Alex Kiessling whose idea was to build a hybrid heads triptych along with two industrial robots. Both robots were fed by real-time tracking data from Vienna via satellite connection to their locations: Berlin and London. The artist himself stayed at his studio in Vienna.

The team behind that awesome project used VVV – a graphical programming environment for easy prototyping and development – by reading data comming from an infra-red touch frame and a Microsoft Kinect. That data was sent to the robots’ servers and the robots started to paint an interpretation of that input simultaneity and recreated the artist’s movements in real-time.

For the project Kiessling chose the most accurate industrial robots one can find. IRB 4600 robots made by ABB. Those robots have an extremely high acceleration and high maximum speeds which are important for exceptionally precise operations. However IRB 4600 had been used exclusively in industry before and therefore the main challenge lay in the main process of interpreting the input data in real-time since the robots’ software wasn’t designed for that. So it took approx. six months to perfect the software. Sadly I couldn’t find any information about how exactly they managed to do that.

Kiessling also had to learn another way to draw, since he wasn’t able to rest the pencil on the painting or to put his hand on its surface. He had to draw straight on the picture, otherwise the robots would have gotten confused because of the infra-red frame sending various positions.

If you’re interested in IRB 4600’s technical data, just click here.

I think ‘Long Distance Art’ showed us another way how we could make use of robots. It’s not only about industrial work, elderly care and telepresence. You can also use a robot an an artist for an interplay of man-machine drawings. At the end the robots’ paintings weren’t exact copies of Kiessling’s work. Each robot’s painting had it’s own, different ‘handwriting’ completing the artist’s work ( also as an artistic telepresence system). A really fascinating and wonderful idea.

Here‘s a cool video explaining the project (youtube).