Drawing robot

Much later, I got to see the poetry in all of this. Under certain conditions, machines can produce art (I did not say create—that’s another conversation).

More recently, I’ve been curious about plotters—the AxiDraw V3 being a good example. They are simple machines: a mechanical arm holds a pen and follows a precise trajectory to draw. The programming it takes, and the resulting art are fascinating.

I decided to use random coordinates instead of trying to plot them for two reasons:

• The robot is not that precise.
• I wanted to experiment (and fail) a lot. 

I ended up tweaking the arrays a bit when a drawing is not interesting.

Since I’ve programmed the drawing sequence as a loop, I had to come up with some rules to decide when to stop the robot.

I decided to let the robot run for longer (an hour) if I felt that the drawing would look better with a lot of lines. Others would have lost their character, and I stopped them after a few cycles (~20 or 30).

I’ve enjoyed this process because it takes me from the idea of perfection and repeatability (the code) to imperfection and noise.

Because the servos are not robust or precise, and because of how loose the overall structure is, the lines are never superimposed. The robot drifts a bit more at every iteration, and although the code does not change, gaps appear. Some lead to gradients, other to patterns.

To stress this contrast, I print the code next to every drawing. The code can be copied. The drawing is unique.