These drones take urban art to new heights

Welcome to the future of multi-storey art: move over paint by numbers, it’s time to paint by drones.

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It’s time for your career as an artist to take off – literally.

Italian design and innovation company, Carlo Ratti Associati, have developed a new piece of tech that can help people collaborate with each other to make huge urban works of art.

Of course, cool new concepts need cool new names. Enter ‘phygital graffiti’ – it’s a term Professor Carlo Ratti uses to explain how his Paint by Drone technology works.

“Phygital graffiti is the idea of leveraging drones and, more generally, digital technologies to create participatory works of public art,” he says.

“Paint by Drone offers a new way to engage citizens with the built environment. Our cities are filled with blank vertical surfaces, either permanent or temporary. With this system, any facade can become a space to showcase new forms of open-source, collaborative art or visualise the heartbeat of a metropolis using real-time data.”

But how does it actually work? Well, firstly by deploying a set of one-metre-wide Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or drones.

Each drone is equipped with sensors and carries a spray paint tank. A central management system regulates their operations in real time, from image painting to flight, and an advanced monitoring system precisely tracks each drone’s position. A protective net placed over a site’s scaffolding allows the drones to move in a safe space. Content is submitted digitally via a specially designed app and the drones use CMYK colours to replicate the printing process.

Ratti says artistic input can be crowdsourced, with people able to download and use the mobile app to select a spot on the canvas and draw their designs. It can also be curated by a single person based on one or several contributions.

“From a technological point of view, the key challenge in the system’s development has been accurate localisation,” he says.

“We had to develop software that could control multiple drone’s operations in real time and precisely track their positions. With this tracking we’re targeting a maximum margin of error of 20 centimetres.” 

That may sound substantial, but it’s actually pretty minimal when you’re creating large-scale multi storey artworks. Ratti says he believes the system “allows precision painting that would otherwise be impossible,” so we could be waving goodbye to some of those nondescript walls we’re so used to seeing on the side of office blocks.

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