Art Robot

In this project I'm showing you how I made my own art robot. The whole concept is to illustrate how we as humans can work together and collaborate with machines and robots to create something new. Both the art style and ethos of the project was inspired by the great pop art artist Andy Warhol.

Warhol was among other things fascinated by commoditization and mass production. This inspired his own art work both in subjects, like Coke bottles, Marilyn Monroe, Campbell Soup cans, and in method - as he used silk screen printing to be able to churn out paintings and art work in his studio The Factory.

I might be severely overstepping, but I like to imagine he would be proud of a robot making art in the style he helped popularize. After all, one of his many famous quotes was: “I want to be a machine”.

Click here to see how I ended up putting this art robot together, so you may learn how to make your very own.

The configuration of this kind of plotter design has many names and there already exists a lot of similar designs, some of which are probably a lot better than the one I made. However I deliberately stayed away from looking at similar designs as the goal of this project was to explore and solve the many expected and unexpected problems along the way. If I used the designs and code already available the project sure could have been finished a lot faster. But my goal with this project was not to finish the robot as quick as I could. The goal of this project was to explore and solve the many expected and unexpected problems along the way. It was a lot of fun!

Here's my github repo with all files I developed for the project.

I recommend you watch the video to see the robot in action and how it was set up to create art. As a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine what a video with 30 pictures a second can do.