Let’s say you’ve got a team of genius engineers and software writers who are smart enough to build robots. Would you build a robot to help better mankind? Or would you make one that only spray paints graffiti? Researchers at Georgia Tech went with the graffiti thing. They spent dozens of hours motion capturing actual graffiti artists so that they could incorporate the data into the algorithms the robot would use to create its own graffiti.
I should note that it’s not a robot like you’d think from Lost In Space. It’s more like a box on a system of cables that moves the box around to spray paint on things. They say that future version can be used by “artists” to reach inaccessible areas. To which I say, why? Would would we want to make it easier to people to deface things? I read the paper they wrote to introduce the project. It includes a lot of complex mathematical equations that obviously took a lot of time to work out. Couldn’t they have spent that time and effort on something besides robot graffiti? I can’t believe that a University approved and put money towards this.