While drones are being used for wide range of applications like delivering packages, monitoring wildlife, tracking storms, and dropping bombs, they may soon be used for painting murals outdoors.

A research team, led by Paul Kry from McGill University’s School of Computer Science, Canada have programmed tiny drones to create dot drawings — an artistic technique known as Stippling (the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots).

Image Source: The HansIndia

The drones are small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and so light that even the slightest air currents can move the lightweight drones off course.

Drawing with dots may sound simple, but it’s not.  These drones are equipped with a miniature arm that holds a bit of ink-soaked sponge. As they hover near the surface that’s about to be painted, internal sensors and a motion capture system help position them to dab the ink in just the right places. Although programming the aerial robots to apply each payload of ink accurately and efficiently required complex algorithms to plan flight paths and adjust for positioning errors, the team was able to address this problem.

So far, the flying robots have rendered – on paper – portraits of Alan Turing, Che Guevara, and Grace Kelly among others. Each drawing is composed of a few hundred to a few thousand black dots of varying sizes. “I thought it would be great to have drones paint portraits of famous computer scientists on them,” Kry said of his inspiration for the idea.

Paul Kry also envisions that eventually, larger drones could be deployed to paint murals on hard-to-reach outdoor surfaces, including curved or irregular facades.

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