A pantograph, traditionally, is a system of linkages designed so that a user’s original movements are copied at a distance, sometimes at a smaller or larger scale. It’s certainly an interesting device, but with the advent of relatively cheap programmable flying devices, aka “drones,” the team of Sang-won Leigh, Harshit Agrawal and Pattie Maes decided to take this concept into the 21st century using a quadcopter to copy and supplement a human’s movements on a remote whiteboard.
Their first try at this, the “Panto 1,” was impressive in that it could keep a marker attached to the whiteboard while in flight, but after upgrading to a better drone, the “Panto 2” appears to be a much more capable “art-vehicle.” From the video below, if the human waits for completion of a stroke by the quadcopter, the remote unit draws rather well. On the other hand, if a human doesn’t wait until a stroke is done, the results are a little messy. Or, put another way, it’s “creating organic yet unfinished touches to the final art.”
Drone control as well as tracking of the human’s pen movements are accomplished via a camera-based motion capture system, meant to be transparent to the user. You can find more information on this system on the MIT Fluid Interfaces Group’s site, or on their 2016 Eindhoven University of Technology exhibition writeup.