French designer duo Pierre Emm and Johan da Silveira—AKA Appropriate Audiences—have made great strides in the fields of tattooing and industrialization.
The duo initially took a Makerbot 3D printer and equipped it with a tattoo needle which allows the machine to penetrate skin. Emm and da Silveira teamed up with software company, Autodesk, in order to equip the machine with a software that takes tattoo designs and downloads them as digital files. In other words, the software allows the printer to replicate any image with pinpoint accuracy from the needle.
After two years of working on this project, Appropriate Audiences stepped up from the Makerbot 3D printer to the Fanuc M-710iC—used in the automotive industry primarily for welding and moving parts. With Autodesk's help, the duo built a custom end effector for a robotic arm and voila: a tattooist is born (but like newborns, not fully developed just yet).
According to The Verge, "You've got to create a 3D scan of the target area, mock up the desired tattoo using custom computer software, and then make sure the recipient stays very, very still. After all, industrial robots are incredibly precise, but most models are not at all responsive. That's why people are killed (very infrequently) by industrial robots: if you get in the way, they don't know to stop."
With that said, a member of the Appropriate Audiences team volunteered to get the first tattoo performed by the robot, and it was a success. The tattoo results are clean and the robot didn't injure the member's leg.
Appropriate Audiences plan on continuing to modify Tatoué in the hopes that it will one day be a useful asset for tattoo artists. On the other hand, some sources indicate the machine could potentially eliminate jobs for tattoo artists.
Is Tatoué a game changer? Absolutely. However, will it mean human tattoo artists will become obsolete? Doubtful.
The art of tattooing has advanced immensely but that doesn't imply previous forms of receiving tattoos will vanish. People in America still get stick and poke tattoos and some will go as far as traveling to foreign countries to get authentically cultural tattoos. Not only that, but tattooing is supposed to be an intimate experience between the tattooer and client.
In my opinion, getting a tattoo done by a robot seems cold and too systematic. However, David Thomasson, head engineering researcher of Autodesk states, "Our research focused on this intimate relationship people will have with machines in the not so distant future, and this project is really pushing that to the limits."