Line-us Creates a Little Robot Drawing Arm

British engineers have created a robot that will copy a user's drawing line for line.

Durrell Bishop and Robert Poll are British engineers passionate about experimentation and art. Together they’ve created Line-us: The little robot drawing arm. A metal plate holds the robot in place and users can draw on the Line-us app and have their drawings recreated with robotic precision.

Drawings can be recreated in real time or saved in the app to be drawn again later. A user can draw on the app and the robot can use its wi-fi connection to draw the sketch regardless of location. The robot needs a constant 5 Volt power supply, most applications shown in the video show the cord connected to a USB power bank. The dimensions without the drawing arm are 83 x 97 x 25 millimeters, and the entire device weighs 150 grams.

The app is compatible with iPads, iPhones, Android smartphones and tablets, Mac and pc laptops. Fingers, styluses, Wacom tablets and Apple Pencils can all be used to do the drawings. For more complex applications the Line-us interface is compatible with Scratch, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Python and Processing. Metal is required for the robot to understand its position in space and in the drawing – the campaign video shows different metal surfaces being used, including hanging from the side of a refrigerator.

Line-us is a great example of makers doing something that they want to be perceived as fun but also a tool for learning about programming and robotics. Based on the pictures of the do-it-yourself assembly kit, it looks like a controller, three servos and some brackets for the four bar linkage are all combined to make a robot that outputs a drawing exactly mirroring its inputs. 9g digital servos are used in the first prototype builds but the exact production servos have not yet been specified. The drawing part of the robot is stressed because unlike a plotter or a 3D printer that chooses the most efficient paths the Line-us follows exactly what the user did, stroke by stroke. A user community is planned to share drawings and programs, and allow users to ‘subscribe’ to the works of another robot artist. The first 1,000 units of Line-us have sold out even though the campaign will remain open until March 3. First units are expected to ship in October 2017.