A team of French designers has developed a unique robot that combines the artistic skills of a tattoo artist with the 3D printing technology. Yes, you heard that right, your next tattoo artist might be a Robot!
What is the best part about that? Your robotic tattoo artist won’t judge you for your choice of tattoo so you can let your imagination run wild and get the funkiest and the weirdest tattoos you want.
Pierre Emm and Johan da Silveira, the French designer duo, collaborated with David Thomasson, the Autodesk engineer, to create the “World’s First Tattoo by Industrial Robot.”
“Our research is really focused on this more intimate relationship that people are likely to have with machines in the not-too-distant future. This project is really pushing that to the limit.”
You can watch a brave person being inked by the robot in this video.
The robotic tattoo artist 3D scans the area where the skin will be inked. A design mock-up of tattoo is prepared via software and the code is fed to the robot. The limb goes into the printer, and the needle moves automatically while etching dark ink into the skin, puncturing 150 times per second.
The robotic body inking machine can give permanent tattoos only. The head of the 3D printer is fitted with sensors to ensure that the needle only pierces the top layer of the skin. Albiet the high precision of the robotic tattoo artist, the sight of a human limb being strapped down to avoid sudden movement is rather eerie.
The designers tested the robot on a human silicon arm model to ensure that the machine could accurately draw on curved surfaces.
The only thing that needs to be seen is how the robots will respond if a person changes his mind about being inked midway! Oops!