In the Future, We Will Paint By Drone

On the list of jobs soon to be taken over by The Robots, you might not expect to see “graffiti artist.” Yet fleets of spray-painting drones could be a thing as soon as this year, thanks to a system that mobilizes fleets of quadcopters to blast large urban facades.

“Paint by Drone” is a project from Carlo Ratti Associati, an Italian design-and-innovation firm with offices in London and Boston. While this invention isn't the first instance of drone-assisted graffiti—New York artist KATSU has used quadcopters to deface a Kendall Jenner ad and spread anti-Trump tags—its level of sophistication appears to pass anything else on the (admittedly limited) drone-art scene. At its heart is a “central-management system” that simultaneously regulates four unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), each painting one color in the CMYK scheme, though for big murals that number could be multiplied to eight drones, 12, or even more.