Now, a robot that can draw your portrait

London: Move over Leonardo da Vince. Now, scientists have developed a new robot which they say can draw as good as a professional artist.

Developed by a team at the Goldsmiths, University of London, the robot can draw whatever it's trained to. The little device has 'eyes' linked to an artificial

mind which imperfectly simulates a small part of the trainer's abilities, the Daily Mail reported.

During a demonstration, artist Patrick Tresset, who is working with Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie in the project called AIKON-II, trained the robot to take portraits of humans, based on his abilities.

It was found that the device watched his master sketching portraits and then put into practice what it has learnt.

A bit less ferocious than Terminator and possibly a bit less exhilarating for the watcher, but nonetheless, the outcome was quite impressive.

The AIKON Project will follow two main research paths: one starts from the study of sketches in archives and notes left by artists and the other is based on contemporary scientific and technological knowledge.

Explaining more about the project Prof Fol Leymarie said, "Even if still partial, the accumulated knowledge about our perceptual and other neurobiological systems is advanced enough that, together with recent progress in computational hardware, computer vision and artificial intelligence, we can

now try to build sophisticated computational simulations of at least some of the identifiable perceptual and cognitive processes involved in face sketching by artists."

The system has always been very limited by its lack of 'awareness' of what it was drawing -- and the next step being worked on by Tresset and Prof Fol Leymarie is to tweak the machine so that it can think for itself and draw in its own style.