Meet NORN: The AI-Powered Robot Who Can Paint Masterpieces

NORN uses paints, canvases, and brushes, just like the rest of us, to create his works of art. This talented robot was the invention of two data scientists from Moscow and Altai, Russia.

The idea came first

AI_NORN was started in 2019 by two programmers. The main goal of the project was to help them clear up their minds after a long day of work. Let's face it, non-stop programming can really take a toll on you. So they decided to program an AI-powered robot painter on their own.

Kidding aside, the NORN project helped the programmers to get their minds off of their stressful work-life and work on
something they were passionate about.

When the two programmers wanted to do something to declutter their minds, they started to draw. But they soon found out that learning to paint as an adult is not as easy as you might think. And this is where the idea for a robot painter was born.

They looked at existing products in the market that do something similar to what they had in mind. They were able to find various kinds of robots, but they all did some limited amount of work. They were all either product that generated digital images using neuronets, robotic manipulators, or plain printers. This is where Norn was born.

NORN painting style

NORN style of painting was designed as something distant from photographic repeating. The creators named it neuroimpressionism. The idea of neuroimpressionism is to identify the main thing through artificial intelligence perception, not a human perception - mood, energy, and reflect them on canvas with brushstroke form and colors.

It would be the first of its kind in the market at the time - a robot that was painting pictures in a neuroimpressionism style. It's capable of creating a painting on a canvas using traditional equipment like brushes and paint.

Here it comes

An image or sketch is fed into the robot by the neural network. It then uses a paintbrush fixed to it to create creative and unique works of art on canvas. You may check the Video to see the full process

The best part about NORN is that it uses the same traditional tools that you and I would use for a painting.

It's not perfect. As you can imagine, the robot still doesn't have the ability and freedom a human artist does. The movement angles for example are limited in comparison to a human. But after careful adjustments to the controls and parameters, the resulting paintings left the creators amazed.

Find more on ainorn.art and instagram.com/ai_norn/

In conclusion, there is a lot to be done. This is actually just the beginning. But with enough machine learning and exploration among the engineers, NORN can become one of the most sophisticated creative robots out there.