Arva Syed: The inspiration for this project itself was from an video that Celeste found on instagram of a little robot chaotically drawing lines on a piece of paper.

Click this link for the instagram video!

And so came about her proposal that I excitedly signed up for. Its such a great idea but there were many ways to implement it. After some research I came up with a few artistic styles we could draw inspiration from.

First is based in islamic tile art, which takes a simple design that could interconnect if repeated. The results are spectacular.

This level of sophistication wouldn’t be too hard to achieve if we just programmed each robot to make one tile’s worth of pattern. For example, if we were to have a robot make the red pattern below on the left, the results would be the pattern on the right.

or even more simply the pattern highlighted in red below.

Next style is if the robots were to create a running pattern like the ones below. Inspired by the patterns computerized sewing machines make, they are made using one line without picking up the pen at all. Although a little difficult to do by hand they would be easy for the simple but concise work of a robot.

Another upside to this style would be that we could program more user interaction like having the head robot being controlled by a person and the others following the lead of the head robot as they draw their running patterns.

Both of these styles would be something I’d love to code because the end product would be so cool.

Well, thats all for now!

-Arva Syed