Goals

The goal of the Robo Artist project was to develop a system which could view an image on a piece of paper from any arbitrary angle and draw that image on another arbitrarily placed piece of paper in marker. Beyond these base goals, our reach goal was to recreate color images, with the robot arm grabbing different colors from a cup to draw a more complex image.

Why is it interesting?

This is an interesting project because of the different challenges that are presented throughout the design and implementation process. From a design perspective we had to create a mechanical pen holder mechanism that could account for the inaccuracies in the Sawyer's position in the z-direction that posed a hardware design problem. Additionally, we had to write a program that would identify a drawing from different angles, skeletonize it to get the marker strokes, and optimize contour paths for the robot arm to follow, which requires robust input contour processing, and planning especially for drawing the image at any arbitrary orientation and position on a table (within the Sawyer's reachable space). 

Real-World Applications

  The Robo Artist has a few applications which could be useful. One is automated art and design. If this system was further optimized, an artist could use it to efficiently replicate their work to have more copies. This could also be used for a manufacturing and prototyping applications like in PCB design, or CNC/laser cutter path planning where scanning an image and creating optimal contour paths is important.  Another application where this technology could be useful is to accurately re-create complex written diagrams which would be inefficient to do by hand, like architecture or HVAC diagrams.