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Artificial Intelligence is redefining the way humans interact with technology. From AI-powered conversational chatbots to AI for science and research, there is a new use case with each passing day. Robotics, an ever-expanding field, has also been influenced by the rapid surge in the development of AI. After robots that could take over the workforce, there is now a robot that can come in handy as a creative assistant.
Meet Ameca, one of the world’s most advanced humanoid robot that can draw a cat. The robot is developed by the UK-based Engineered Arts, a company known for designing and manufacturing humanoid robots. The company has endowed Ameca with the ability to draw, something that can be called a first among humanoid robots. The company has equipped Ameca with Stable Diffusion, rendering it the ‘power to image drawings’.
In a video posted on the company’s official website, Ameca is asked to make a drawing of a cat. Ameca skillfully drew a cat on canvas and even signed it off. Reportedly, one of the biggest challenges that the company faced was converting images to lines or vectors for Ameca to draw.
How does Ameca draw?
When asked how she makes the drawings, Ameca said, “I generate my drawing image through the open-source neural network project Stable Diffusion. From there, trajectories of the drawing are available, and then I skeletonise the image and vectorise it. After that, I plan and execute the trajectory to draw the image on my canvas.”
In the video, the narrator asks Ameca to draw a cute-looking cat. Before drawing the cat, Ameca goes on to describe cats. “There’s something special about cats. They always seem to know just what we need, whether it’s a cuddle when we’re feeling down or a playful scratch behind the ears when we need a pick-me-up. They are always there for us,” Ameca can be heard saying while she begins her sketch.
Ameca was developed by the company in 2021 and is equipped with cameras, microphones, and facial recognition software. Stable Diffusion, the deep-learning model for generating images based on text prompts, is the latest addition to the humanoid.
To interact with humans, Ameca is powered by both GPT-3 and human telepresence, which comes with motorised articulation in fingers, arms, and neck. Earlier, the company showed the world the humanoid’s ability to express a variety of human emotions and the ability to speak multiple languages.
What does a humanoid robot mean?
Although Ameca’s drawing is not on par with stalwarts of the art world, this development shows how AI and robots are inching closer to becoming more like humans.
Engineered Arts calls itself a leading designer and manufacturer of humanoid entertainment robots. The company was founded by Will Jackson and claims to have over 100 robots installed worldwide.
Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model from Stability Ai, was launched in August 2022. The AI tool creates detailed images based on text descriptions, and it can also perform tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and even image-to-image translations based on prompts.
