FRIDA, the robot that collaborates with humans to create artworks

It is called FRIDA in honor of Frida Kahlo, and it is a robotic arm that collaborates with humans to create works of art: thanks to an artificial intelligence system similar to ChatGPT, it can translate a text, a song or a photograph into a painting, following the user's instructions and gradually improving its somewhat inaccurate brushstrokes thanks to the supervision of a machine learning system. The first results will be presented by researchers of Carnegie Mellon University at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023 in London.

The FRIDA (Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts) robot is similar to a robotic paint system, "but it's not an artist," explains researcher Peter Schaldenbrand. "FRIDA is not generating the ideas to communicate. The artist can specify high-level goals for FRIDA and then FRIDA can execute them." So far, the colors still have to be mixed manually, but soon the robotic arm will be equipped with an automatic mixing system. The whole process for the realization of the work on canvas takes a few hours. For the future, the researchers intend to expand FRIDA's skills and extend its use to sculpture.