Vincent van BOT: Pocket-sized robot that can recreate doodles attracts £40,000 of sales in just 30 hours

Line-us robot is like an automated 'prosthetic limb' that recreates your drawings
It grips a pen much like a human hand to sketch out pictures drawn on screen
The London-based designers say it will allow artists to send their work to friends
The gadget exceeded its crowd funding goal of £39,000 in just under 30 hours

Published: 08:34 EST, 3 February 2017 | Updated: 08:42 EST, 3 February 2017

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It could be the perfect gadget for those who like to share their doodles.

Engineers have developed a pocket-sized robot that can recreate sketches on paper just as they were originally drawn, allowing them to be sent all over the world.

The Line-us robot, which its designers say works like an extension of the human hand, has raised £39,000 in just 30 hours on a crowd funding site.

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The Line-us robot is an extension of the human hand that allows you to doodle around or send and receive hand-drawn messages

THE LINE-US ROBOT

The Line-us weighs 150 grams.

It requires a 5V dc 1A from a USB battery, power supply or computer via a micro-USB.

It can support a pen with a diameter of up to 10mm.

The robot works on iPad, iPhone, Android, PC and Mac.

It connects to Scratch, Arduino, Python and Processing or via a TCP socket.

The mini robot is essentially a USB-powered arm that connects to an app on your smartphone, tablet, MAC or PC.

By sketching on the screen using a finger, mouse, stylus or Apple Pencil, the user can then instruct the robot to recreate their masterpiece.

Line-us draws the image using a pen on paper in the same order the person who drew it did so you can see exactly how your friends' drawings came to fruition.

Anyone with the app can send their doodle straight to another person's Line-us, allowing sketches to be shared anywhere in the world.

The robot can draw on any writeable surface - from sketchbooks to fridges or even on a wall.

Line-us lets users save their drawings, send them as messages to friends or publish them to a public gallery.

This mini robot is essentially a USB-powered arm that connects to an app on your smartphone

For those who are artistically challenged, the app also allows users to trace images from the photos on their device.

The robot was developed by Durrell Bishop, who teaches product and interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London, and Robert Poll, who has worked as a technologist for over 20 years.

The pair launched their product on Kickstarter on 1 February and has now attracted £50,000 worth of funding with 700 people backing their project.

The pair launched their product on Kickstarter on 1 February and it was fully-funded in just 30 hours. There are still early bird units available costing £69 instead of the usual £99

They are raising funds to produce the first batch of 1000 Line-us machines.

'This is way in excess of even our wildest expectations, so we have to say a huge thank-you to all of our backers for making it happen', the pair wrote on their Kickstarter page.

'We're very excited to start work on getting Line-us manufactured and our looking forward to the next few months', they said.

The pair hope to begin shipping Line-us in October and expect it will cost around £99 when it goes on sale more widely.