Artistic pen drawing on an arbitrary surface using an impedance-controlled robot

We present a semi-autonomous robotic pen-drawing system that is capable of creating pen art on an arbitrary surface with varying thickness of pen strokes but without reconstructing the surface explicitly. Our robotic system relies on an industrial, seven-degree-of-freedom (7DoF) manipulator that can be both position- and impedance-controlled. We use a vector-graphics engine to take an artist's pen drawing as input and generate Bézier spline curves with varying offsets. In order to estimate geometric details of the target, unknown surface, during drawing, we rely on incremental and adaptive sampling on the surface using a combination of position and impedance control. Then, our control algorithm physically replicates this drawing on any arbitrary, continuous surface by impedance-controlling the manipulator. We demonstrate that our system can create visually-pleasing and complicated artistic pen drawings on general surfaces without explicit surface-reconstruction nor visual feedback.