Can you teach a robot to draw? We normally think of drawing as an (almost) exclusively human activity. While other animals, such as chimpanzees, can be trained to paint or draw, drawing isn’t something that is regularly observed in animals other than humans.
At SensiLab, we have been working for several years on making robots designed explicitly to create their own drawings. These drawing robots, or drawbots, are relatively simple, insect-like machines that often work cooperatively as swarms and exhibit common aspects of collective behaviour and emergent intelligence.