Music-driven Robot Swarm Painting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control framework that enables robot swarms to create paintings driven by musical inputs, linking music and visual art through coordinated robotic actions and emotional expression.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for controlling heterogeneous robot swarms to produce art based on music, combining simulation and real-world implementation.

Findings

Successful simulation of music-driven painting by robot swarms.

Real robot implementation with LED-equipped units demonstrates practical viability.

Framework effectively translates musical input into visual art through coordinated robot behavior.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel control framework for robotic swarms capable of turning a musical input into a painting. The approach connects the two artistic domains, music and painting, leveraging their respective connections to fundamental emotions. The robotic units of the swarm are controlled in a coordinated fashion using a heterogeneous coverage policy to control the motion of the robots which continuously release traces of color in the environment. The results of extensive simulations performed starting from different musical inputs and with different color equipments are reported. Finally, the proposed framework has been implemented on real robots equipped with LED lights and capable of light-painting.