A couple of years ago, architecture and design firm Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) showcased a system in which spray-paint-wielding drones were used to draw images on walls. It was very clever, but perhaps not something that could easily become a commercial product. The company's Scribit wall-drawing robot, however, is intended to be just that.

Like a smaller indoor version of the firm's one-off 2015 Vertical Plotter, Scribit moves on a 2-axis plane across vertical surfaces such as walls, windows or whiteboards, drawing images or text as it does so. The aluminum-bodied circular device is suspended from two lightweight diagonal cables, and can reportedly be set up in just five minutes, requiring nothing more than "two nails and a power plug."

It's equipped with four erasable markers of different colors, along with an eraser, so it can delete its old drawings as it creates new work in the same area. Users utilize an app to upload images or text to the internet-connected robot, and to inform it of the dimensions of the space on which it will be drawing that content.

CRA will be officially unveiling Scribit in Milan on April 16th, at the Salone del Mobile design event. 

You can see the robot in action – albeit briefly – in the following video. And "Scribit," incidentally, means "s/he writes" in Latin.

Source: Scribit, New Atlas