DrawBo Is a Robotic Drawing Teacher for Kids

With the pandemic in full swing, children are looking at screens more than ever before as more schools offer remote learning instead of in-classroom education. One of the online classes that aren't being offered to kids is art, maybe because it's deemed unessential. That said, California-based tech firm DrawBo has launched an in-home tutor that uses AI to help young ones learn how to draw and improve their ability to focus.

"With DrawBo, your child can spend endless hours learning creative drawings from a patient tutor who never tires of teaching," the team states. "Kids can learn to draw in the safety and convenience of their homes, with no worry about screen-time, commute-time to the art class, peer pressure and other distractions."

DrawBo is a palm-sized, butterfly-shaped robot equipped with a writing utensil and hung from a dry erase board, or other writing media, using a pair of adhesive-backed lines connected to a pair of custom stepper motors. It's also controlled by 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller with Bluetooth that allows it to pair with a phone app kids use to select an image they would like to draw. Once the pic is selected, DrawBo leverages AI to split the image into simple curves and lines that kids can follow through a series of steps to complete the image.

The DrawBo app has thousands of images to choose from, categorized into three skill levels- easy, medium, and advanced, with each more complicated than the last. After the image is selected, the robot uses its stepper motors and pulleys to position the writing utensil up, down, left, and right for each step of the drawing, complete with curves and other round shapes. After each step, the robot pauses for a period of time (that can be adjusted) so that children have time to reproduce that portion of the picture.

DrawBo is currently wrapping up a campaign on Kickstarter with pledges starting at $149, which gets you the robot and 500 in-app drawing images.