MIT's Clever New Drone Draws What You Do. Mostly

Humans have always used tools to create art, but paintbrushes, pens, and chisels don't have an agenda of their own; they bend to the will of the person wielding them. But a project by students at the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group ponders what happens when a machine has a voice in the artistic process. In this case, the machine is a drone, and that drone is essentially a flying phantograph. As a human draws with a pen, a camera captures the motion and a computer communicates it to the drone, which mimics what the pen is drawing. In the video you see a person make a sweeping gesture across a canvas; the drone mirrors it, creating a similar mark on its own canvas.