Now drones can be artists too. A graffiti artist named Katsu has equipped an unmanned vehicle with a spray-paint can so that he can remotely tag buildings in Silicon Valley. The drone moves through a combination of Katsu’s controls and autonomous maneuvers to avoid crashing into objects. That means the graffiti is a bit less nuanced than what you’d get from a human like, say, Banksy. But it does present opportunities to tag hard-to-reach locations.
“What does it mean that I’m able to be throwing these strokes up and across a canvas that is 30 feet wide and is suspended 25 feet in the air?” Katsu asked in an interview with the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. “Painting in these ways just wasn’t previously possible.”
Katus plans to make the development tools for the graffiti drones open source, so we may one day have a whole legion of robotic vandals tagging urban landscapes. Cops should love that.
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