Small Works Robot

spreading wide my narrow hands. -- Emily Dickinson

In December I made a robot for painting on small canvases. All of my robots to date have been 7" plus on one side at least with turning radii from 3" to 6". They won't work well on canvases smaller than 18"x24". I wanted to make small works both for quicker technique experiments and to show small works.

Zeb3 is about 4" by 6", but because I turned the wheels inward rather than outward I have a robot that is functionally very small. The turning radius is only 1/2" and it can turn in place. It is still a little unstable. Imagine if your car only had two wheels and they were behind the front seat inside the car and only about 3 feet apart. You can really turn, but not very fast.

I have never seen a robot with this idea and I have reviewed about 300 examples hoping to find someone who had done it before so I could shorten the learning curve. Programming is still simple: no spirals or conditional actions yet. The time to develop the robot took most of my available time in December and I only had 2 & 1/4 days to paint that month.

Here are someexamples that are each 9"x12":







This robot seems to be able to make stripes pretty well, so I may pursue that for a while.

These works won an Award of Merit in Manhattan Arts International's Small Works 2005 competition I just learned tonight.


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