Jackoon Painting from Oscar G. Torres on Vimeo.

The oddly named Jackoon is the work of grad student Oscar G Torres. It’s a robot that paints. The name is a combination of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, because the robot’s art resembles their work. Jackoon doesn’t just throw paint around randomly. It uses a camera on the ceiling that knows where the robot is on the canvas and directs it based on an image that the robot is supposed to imitate, and on the color paint that the robot has.

It’s all fun and games until the little bot starts imitating Pollock’s drinking.

[Dvice]

Chukyo university Japan has developed the Picasso 2, a robotic arm which can sketch on paper with a brush or a pen. Once you load a picture, the onboard software removes the background from the images and extracts the skin tone. The bot may not be Pablo Picasso, but what do you expect, he’s all arm.

[New Launches]

Service Utility Bot Pictor (pictured) scales buildings to clean and paint them.  Last week we told you about Oobject’s list of 15 wall climbing robots, well Pictor uses some of the same technology.  Its feet are coated with a nano surface which enables it to climb.  The bot sports a laser, camera, and color sensor, and it is powered by a fuel cell.  It prepares the wall with its cleaning laser and then uses an airless machine to paint the building without creating atomized spray.  Voila, a perfect building painting/cleaning every time, and no human lives at risk (excluding the billions at risk during the robot apocalypse).  It would be interesting to see what would happen should a graffiti artist get his hands on one of these.

[Volkerjantzen] VIA [Gizmo Watch]