Why these schools are getting art robots

Oct 18, 2018

This article is published in collaboration with Futurism.

A student paints a heart-shaped message outside a damaged store that was looted during riots after the NHL Stanley Cup finals in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia June 17, 2011. The riots on Wednesday began in the closing moments of Vancouver Canucks' 4-0 loss to the Boston Bruins in the deciding seventh game of the Stanley Cup NHL Championship, a series that Vancouver had been favored to win. About 150 civilians and nine police officers were hurt and at least 50 stores damaged or looted. REUTERS/Jason Lee (CANADA - Tags: CIVIL UNREST SPORT ICE HOCKEY) - GM1E76I13OH01

Conru hopes that students will enter the 2019 Robot Art Competition. Image: REUTERS/Jason Lee

Dan Robitzski

Journalist, Futurism

Our Impact

What's the World Economic Forum doing to accelerate action on Artificial Intelligence?

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Artificial Intelligence is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Artificial Intelligence

PaintBots

The Conru Foundation wants to get kids hooked on high-tech art.

Andrew Conru, the Robot Art Competition’s founder and organizer, told Futurism last week that his organization will award 40 public schools with free, easily-programmed robots that can grab paintbrushes and create portraits, landscapes, and other computer-aided designs.

Image: Futurism

2D Printer

The device looks sort of like a 3D printer. A robotic arm hangs and rapidly glides around above a blank canvas, darting about in three dimensions as it paints precise images, then cleans and swaps out its paintbrushes to start over with a new color.

Have you read?

Schools that apply for a robot can download the drawing software for free and will also get tips on how to program the bot to draw specific images.

Ultimately, Conru hopes that students will be inspired to create their own works of robot-assisted art and enter the 2019 Robot Art Competition to try for some of the cash prizes awarded to creative projects that use innovative techniques like machine learning-generated images or abstract recreations of existing paintings.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.