Acrylic Robotics is a startup based in Montreal looking to democratize art by enabling artists to create high quality replicas of their work using robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbV8tOpomM4

Art Creation Pipeline

Most of my work at Acrylic was building a custom version of Krita, an open source drawing software similar to the likes of Adobe Illustrator. Specifically, I augmented the software to ensure

• robot constraints were intuitively conveyed to the artists
  • we only want artists to draw something that we can guarantee we can create using our robots. This included customizing and limiting tool types, brush sizes, colour physics, and colour types
• artist brush strokes were captured and processed into a robot-friendly format for replication

Painting Brush Stroke Optimization

Once we had a robot-friendly format, it turned into an algorithm problem that any computer scientist would be happy to hear. Specifically, given an ordered set of overlapping brush strokes, I wanted to see if we can use algorithms such as A* to reorder the set such that we minimized the time needed to finish a painting by minimizing the distance the robots need to travel and while taking into account heuristics such as needing to change colours / dip colours and ensuring that the final art piece is representative of the artists original vision.

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