Scientists program robot swarms to create art


Oct. 14 (UPI) — Computer scientists at Georgia Tech have programmed a swarm of robots to intuitively mix colors and decorate a canvas, expanding the technological toolkit available to artists.

Researchers didn’t set out to program artists out of the creative process. Instead, researchers envision their robotic system as a seamless extension of the artist.

“We wanted to explore the potential of multi-robot systems for the purpose of artistic painting, providing artists with an intuitive way to interact with a multi-robot system that abstracts them from the control of the robots or the management of resources,” lead study author María Santos, Georgia Tech computer engineer, told UPI in an email.

The robot swarm — described Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI — isn’t programmed to dream up new images, but it does problem solve with some level of autonomy.

“The human user, the artist, specifies color concentrations over the canvas, for example, by pressing their fingers on a tablet-like interface,” Santos said. “The color commands are then broadcasted to the multi-robot team, which therefore has information about what distribution of color is desired.”

Cognizant of the available paints and the paints available to their nearest neighbors, the robots coordinate the most efficient strategy for mixing and applying pigments to different regions of canvas.

“As they displace over the canvas, covering the different color density functions, they lay trails of paint by mixing color in the closest proportion to the densities they are tracking,” Santos said. “Furthermore, the assignment of a robot to a particular density is not fixed: robots reassign themselves over the canvas to go after the closest densities at each point in time or those densities they can contribute the most.”

As the artist alters their creative demands, the robots adjust their strategy and execution, accordingly.

So far, researchers have relied on projected light trails to demonstrate the robot swarm’s potential. Scientists are currently developing bots that can actually apply paint.

“This step involves not only developing the hardware necessary to manage paint, but also studying the painting release mechanism needed to achieve appropriate color mixing,” Santos said.

Once researchers have bots than can actually paint, they hope to get their technology in the hands of actual artists and see what they can create.

“Testing it with artists would be ideal, as it would let us see which features in the system are most interesting and potentially unlock new directions for the creative expansion of the system,” Santos said.





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