in the near future, robot swarms guided by human artists could execute paintings

postdoctoral research associate in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at princeton university, maría santos, has presented her research on swarm robotics, creating an interactive multi-robot painting through colored motion trails. the robotic painting system is composed of a team of mobile robots equipped with different color paints able to create pictorial compositions by leaving trails of color as they move throughout a canvas.

images by maría santos

‘we envision this system to be used by an external user who can control the concentration of different colors over the painting by specifying density maps associated with the desired colors over the painting domain, which may vary over time,’ comments maría santos. ‘the robots distribute themselves according to such color densities by means of a heterogeneous distributed coverage control paradigm, whereby only those robots equipped with the appropriate paint will track the corresponding color density function.’

‘the painting composition therefore arises as the integration of the motion trajectories of the robots, which lay paint as they move throughout the canvas tracking the color density functions,’ santos continues. ‘the proposed interactive painting system is evaluated on a team of mobile robots. different experimental setups in terms of paint capabilities given to the robots highlight the effects and benefits of considering heterogeneous teams when the painting resources are limited.’

the current research has tested the robots without paint, proving their ability to work using projections that simulate the colored trailed. each one can produce three primary printing colors — cyan, magenta and yellow — which can be combined to produce the other hues. santos proved the robots were able to vary and lay the colors, while taking into consideration what the other robots are doing.

‘at each point in time, each robot has information about the color concentrations desired by the human artist and can get information about the relative positions of its closest neighbors and the paints available to them,’ santos concludes.