Willow SCARA Drawing Robot, v. 1

I finished this very version 1 initial prototype of a robotic drawing arm made from willow branches from my garden, and using syringe hydraulic actuators (no electronics or motors). Terrible picture again, sorry. One day, I’ll do some better quality photos of all these things.

This is one style of a SCARA arm used in robotics, where the S and C stand for selective and compliance, in that it can move horizontally in xy axes, but not vertically in z. In this case, the movement is provided via a human operator pulling and pushing the water-filled syringes and tubing to actuate the joints of each arm segment. (Here’s some related concept art I did for this using AI before/during the actual build.)

I spoke about this and some of my other low tech human drawing bots (or “biobots“) in this episode of the Silicon Synapse show. I’m trying to find that mystical crack in the world between human-whatever and AI-whatever where something stops being a human-ish thing, and becomes a “mere mechanical process” such that it becomes according to the bureaucratic gods who deem it their role to interpret such omens… UNCOPYRIGHTABLE!!!

I, of course, have a lot more to say on these topics, but am trying to document at least minimally some of the highways and byways that I have traversed this past year while investigating these issues creatively. I’ll also do a demo drawing with this machine in the coming days and post that here.

Unfortunately, this initial design is pretty limited in its range of motion, which is okay because I was more just trying to understand how the mechanisms work, and now I have something adequate to experiment with which I think will be able to tell me through experimentation proper dimensions and alignment for an updated version with a greater range of motion.