Niklas Roy Investigates "Gestalt" Generative Art with a Custom Arduino-Compatible Turtle Robot

Artist and technologist Niklas Roy has designed an Arduino-compatible take on that classic of computing education, the pen-enabled turtle — but as an outlet for generative art, rather than learning to program in Logo.

"This project explores the intersection of robotics, generative art, and perception. What began as a casual experiment developed into a broader investigation: how simple robotic behavior can create visual structures, how these structures interact with human perception, and how such experiments connect to the history of artificial intelligence and Gestalt psychology," Roy explains. "The research combines hands-on prototyping with historical reflection, rediscovering old ideas in a playful way while turning my workshop into a factory, where cute tiny robots diligently create art."

Readers of a certain age will likely remember the robotic "turtle," a mainstay of education originally developed by Seymour Papert at the MIT AI Lab: a typically-wheeled robot fitted with a pen, and in more advanced variants the ability to lift and lower it, which would respond to instructions from a computer. These were usually provided in the form of a Logo program, a language designed to be accessible and teach the core concepts of programming.

Roy's turtle, designed in FreeCAD, was envisioned as a "tiny plotter" capable of drawing on a canvas of near-arbitrary size. Initial prototypes were slow, and attempts to increase its performance came at the cost of precision and angular reproducibility. Further experiments introduced a variant that could clean lines drawn by the other models on a whiteboard, and one which could detect existing lines — leading to experimentation in "Gestalttheorie" as it applies to simple robots interactively working to create generative art.

"What began as a playful evening with a friend," Roy recalls, "grew into an exploration of robotics, art, and perception. Along the way, I rediscovered ideas from Gestalt psychology, early AI research, and the educational visions of pioneers like Seymour Papert. The surprising part is not that these ideas already existed, but how alive they feel when rebuilt today. A simple robot with stepper motors, a pen, and a sensor can still create drawings that are both fascinating and puzzling."

While Roy has said that he will not provide step-by-step instructions for building your own mini-turtle, he has published a schematic, CAD files, a bill of materials, and source code on his website, under an unspecified license, for anyone who fancies making one themselves.