Robot Painting Art: From AARON to ABB's Art Car

Robot painting art is older than most people expect. Long before image generators, inventors built machines that drew with pens, and artists wrote programs that steered robots across paper. This post follows that line from an 18th century clockwork draughtsman and Harold Cohen's AARON to Ai-Da, the humanoid whose portrait of Alan Turing sold for over a million dollars, and to the robot writing calligraphy at this year's Venice Biennale. It also covers ABB's part, from a robot-painted art car to a single-arm YuMi that draws, and what drawing robots for the home still cannot do.

The humanoid robot artist Ai-Da beside one of its self-portraits, 2021. Photo: Leemurz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From clockwork draughtsmen to AARON's plotters

The first drawing machines were showpieces. Between 1768 and 1774 Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Frédéric Leschot built three automata in Switzerland: a musician, a writer and a draughtsman. The draughtsman, shaped like a small boy, draws four pictures, among them a portrait of Louis XV and a dog with "Mon toutou" written beside it. Cams store the movements of his hand in two directions, a third motion lifts the pencil, and every so often he blows dust off the paper. The figures were made to help sell watches, and they still work at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Neuchâtel.

The Draughtsman, one of the Jaquet-Droz automata built between 1768 and 1774, at the museum in Neuchâtel. Photo: Gre regiment / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

With a computer in charge, a machine could pick its own picture. Harold Cohen, a painter who had represented Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale, started AARON in 1972 and kept working on it until his death in 2016. AARON made its own compositions, first abstract shapes, later rocks, plants and people. Its early drawings came out of custom turtle robots and flatbed plotters, and Cohen sometimes colored them by hand with fabric dye. In the 1990s he built painting machines that put AARON's images down in ink and dye. AARON never learned a style by itself, though. Cohen had to code every new skill.

An operator at a flatbed graphics plotter in a USDA data center in Washington, 1966. Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Industrial robots joined in once factories were full of them. At the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, a Tokico arm from Japan was shown under a sign that read Painting Robot. In 2007 the German artist group robotlab showed bios [bible] at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, an installation in which an industrial robot writes out Luther's Bible by hand on rolls of paper. It draws each calligraphic line with a pen, like a monk in a scriptorium, and robotlab says it takes about nine months to finish the whole text. These robots followed fixed paths and had no idea what the letters meant.

In robotlab's installation bios [bible], an industrial robot writes out the Bible with a pen. Photo: Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Robot painters in galleries and at the Venice Biennale

Ai-Da brought the idea to a wide audience. The humanoid was completed in 2019 for the gallerist Aidan Meller, with hardware by Engineered Arts in Cornwall and a drawing arm built by students at the University of Leeds. Cameras in its eyes let it sketch what it sees, and in 2022 it got an arm that paints from a palette. Some early abstract paintings credited to Ai-Da were finished by a human artist, a detail worth remembering whenever a robot is named as the artist. In November 2024 its "A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing" sold at Sotheby's for $1,084,800, and in September 2026 two production companies announced a four-part documentary about the robot.

Ai-Da drawing at the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, in response to the work of Ben Nicholson, 2021. Photo: Viytc471 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

This year the Venice Biennale has a robot of its own. At the China pavilion of the 61st International Art Exhibition, Xinhua reported on 2 September, visitors queued to watch a robot arm guide a traditional calligraphy brush across paper, writing the characters for "Dream" and "Stream", the pavilion's theme. In Carrara, Euronews reported on 24 September, a Robotor arm guided by AI software carved a full-size marble statue of the goddess Tyche, and human sculptors added the final touches. Royal Delft, meanwhile, displays a test painting robot built with Delft University of Technology to decorate pottery, a step between hand painting and printed transfers.

A test painting robot for Delft Blue pottery, built with Delft University of Technology, on show at Royal Delft in 2024. Photo: Andy Li / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

ABB's best known art project came out of its car paint shops. In 2022 its IRB 5500 paint robots, fitted with a PixelPaint print head with 1,000 nozzles, copied artwork by the eight year old painter Advait Kolarkar and the Dubai design collective Illusorr onto a Volkswagen SUV in under 30 minutes, with the paint head's path coordinated in RobotStudio. Our post on paint robots from car booths to home walls covers the industrial side. On a smaller scale, ABB's download center offers a Single-arm YuMi Drawing Demo Kit with everything needed to build a demo in which the seven-axis IRB 14050 makes a drawing.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot with PixelPaint over Illusorr's finished design on the art car, 2022. Photo: ABB

Drawing robots at home, and what they still cannot do

At home, drawing robots are mostly maker projects and small plotters. Hobbyists build pen plotters that hang on a wall from two strings, small delta robots that sketch portraits and arms that copy a face from a camera, then bring them to maker fairs. A pen needs little force, so the parts can be cheap. A home robot that paints with real brushes is much harder. The paint has to be mixed, loaded and cleaned off, and a brush changes shape with every stroke, so the robot needs to see what it has already done before it adds the next mark.

A small robot arm drawing a face at the Brighton Mini Maker Fair, 2011. Photo: Jeremy Keith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Researchers are also looking at robots that paint alongside people. A University of Michigan study, reported in June 2026, had eight abstract artists paint with a robot arm over three weeks. Working with the robot gave them more creative control without the social pressure of working with another person, the team found, and the artists wanted different amounts of robot autonomy. Some wanted full control, while others wanted the robot to push them out of their habits. Collaborative arms such as ABB's GoFa, which slows and stops when it senses contact, are built for that kind of shared table.

Advait Kolarkar smiles as an ABB paint robot prints his artwork onto the car. Photo: ABB

Ownership is one open question. On 23 September 2026 the Kluwer Copyright Blog asked whether the pastiche exception in copyright law can cover AI-assisted paintings made in the manner of old masters. Authorship is another. Copying a style is easy for a machine and inventing one is hard, and AARON's 44 years of hand-coded rules show how much of a program's art comes from the person who wrote it. A single-arm YuMi with a pen draws exactly what it is told to draw. For home buyers the questions are simpler: price, mess, and whether an arm is safe around children.

Programming a single-arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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