Human-Robot-Robot-Human Collaboration 🏆

Between a text prompt and a hand on the brush, where does the robot stop being a tool?

Two robots make one sketch together. One is autonomous: guided by CoFRIDA, it turns a person’s high-level goals, given as text prompts, into brush strokes that respond to what is already on the canvas. The other is teleoperated: a visitor drives it in real time, so its strokes carry their intent directly, like an extension of their body.

Visitors watch the robots work and look at the finished drawing, and so become the evaluators. As in the Turing Test, they are asked to judge, but the question is not whether a machine can think like a human. It is who made this: which marks came from a person, which from a machine, and whether that distinction still matters.

• Who is the creator? Do the robots carry out human intent, or transform it? Does teleoperation leave the robot any agency? Does language guidance leave the human too little?
• What role does intent play? Can human influence be seen in the drawing, or do the robots’ strokes blur it?
• Does origin matter? Can we appreciate the drawing without knowing who did what, or do we look for an author in order to find meaning?

The piece plays on how readily we read intent into machine motion, and asks whether authorship is still a useful idea when making things passes through technology at every level of control. It brings together two systems the artists had shown separately, CoFRIDA (ICRA 2024) and TelePainting (Art Center Nabi), and combines them here for the first time.