<title>Painting on the World Wide Web: the PumaPaint project</title>

Abstract

The PumaPaint project is a web robot that allows users to create original artwork on the WWW. The site allows control of a PUMA 760 robot equipped with four paintbrushes, jars of red, green, blue and yellow paint and white paper attached to a vertical easel. Users must download a Java interface allowing interactive control of the robot. This interface contains two windows showing live camera views of the work site and various controls for connecting and disconnecting to the robot, viewing the task status and controlling the painting task. Approximately fifteen hundred unique hosts have downloaded the interface in the first four months of twenty-four hour a day operation beginning June 3, 1998. This paper describes the background of the PumaPaint project, a presentation of hardware and software detail and a discussion of the author's experiences in managing the site over the first four months of operation.