Watch As the First Human is Tattooed By An Industrial Robot

Here at Futurism, we’ve featured robots gardening, bagging groceries, and surgically stitching a grape, so it’s not much of a surprise when we hear about a robot giving a human a tattoo.

French designers Pierre Emm and Johan da Silveira worked with Autodesk engineer David Thomasson to equip an industrial robot with a tattoo machine — and to test it on Emm.

This project obviously entails careful examination of safety measures.

Unlike a human tattoo artist, a robot cannot adjust to subtle movements when inking human flesh with a needle. So it’s necessary to give the robot precise positioning information. This is done by taking a 3D scan of the human area to be tattooed and creating a design through software.

“To be tattooed by a robot represents for us the accomplishment in the development of our process which we have worked towards,” Emm tells The Creators Project. “Behind the machine is a lot of human involvement. The tattoo also represents the connection between the tool and the person piloting the machine. We work very hard on the question of hygiene and security to bring the process to the highest level possible.”