Drawing Robots Trip

During 2019 SensiLab has been working on developing the latest iteration of the on-going Drawing Robots project. The goal this time was to create a standard pen based robot platform that will allow creative coders to explore their practice in a physical way, without having to get bogged down in the specifics of robot design.

This latest version (DrawBot V3) consists of a custom designed Printed Circuit Board (PCB), two motors and wheels and a set of 3D printed parts that, with the help of a small servo,Da create a mechanism that allows the robot to raise and lower a pen onto a sheet of paper though a hole in the middle of the robot.

An early version of this design was shown in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2018, and based on its success we are looking into the possibility of mass producing the robots in order to get them into the hands of artists and students to see what others will come up with.

To this end our Lab Manager, Elliott Wilson, along with Dr Rowan Page (MADA) and 5 Industrial Design students will be heading over to Shenzhen, China, to investigate scaling up production of the DrawBot from an in-lab prototype to a product that could be mass produced and sold. The team will be spending two weeks working on refining the design to a manufacturable level, exploring the electronic markets, visiting PCB and prototyping factories and identifying possible suppliers for the various parts that make up the robot. The end goal of the trip is to come up with a bill of materials, final designs for the custom plastic parts and a unit cost at volume for the completed robot.