SSK: Skillful Surface drawing using KUKA-IIWA

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IEEE T-RO 2023

IEEE ICRA 2019

IEEE ICRA 2018

Abstract

IEEE T-RO 2023 , extended version with mobile platform:

We present a semiautonomous robotic pen-drawing system, called SSK, that is capable of creating pen art on a large nonplanar surface. Our robotic system relies on a seven-degree-offreedom impedance-controlled manipulator with a three-degreeof-freedom holonomic mobile platform. We use a vector-graphics engine to take an artist’s pen drawing as input, and we generate Bézier spline curves to be drawn on the given target drawing canvas. Then, our system finds a set of minimal, discrete configurations for the mobile platform to cover the entire canvas surface while considering the reachability of the manipulator. The drawing is split into multiple subdrawings according to the found configurations. Our system replicates the spline drawing on the target surface using impedance control, which enables us to compensate for the uncertainty and incompleteness inherent to canvas-surface representations and various robotic and sensor noises. We demonstrate that our system can create visually pleasing and complicated pen art on large, nonplanar surfaces.

IEEE ICRA 2019, extended version with distortion-free conformal mapping: ▼

We present a robotic pen-drawing system that is capable of faithfully reproducing pen art on an unknown surface. Our robotic system relies on an industrial, seven degree-of-freedom(DoF) manipulator that can be both position- and impedance-controlled. In order to estimate a rough geometry of the target, continuous surface, we first generate a point cloud of the surface using an RGB-D camera, which is filtered to remove outliers and calibrated to the physical canvas surface. Then, our control algorithm physically reproduces digital drawing on the surface by impedance-controlling the manipulator. Our impedance-controlled drawing algorithm compensates for the uncertainty and incompleteness inherent to a point-cloud estimation of the drawing surface. Moreover, since drawing 2D vector pen art on a 3D surface requires surface parameterization that does not destroy the original 2D drawing, we rely on the least squares conformal mapping. Specifically, the conformal map reduces angle distortion during surface parameterization. As a result, our system can create distortion-free and complicated pen drawings on general surfaces with many unpredictable bumps robustly and faithfully.

IEEE ICRA 2018, primary version without an RGB-D camera: ▼

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.

Drawing Results

Large-scale Drawing Results

Dogs

Farm

Paris

Artistic Drawing Results

Racoon

Kangaroo

Bear

Owl

Reproduced on Arbitrary Surfaces

Tiger1

Tiger2

Girl1

Girl2

Pattern Drawing Results

Grid

Sierpiński curve

Snowflake

Drawing Statistics (selected)

	Dogs	Farm	Paris	Racoon	Kangaroo	Bear	Owl
# of Strokes	2,634	927	1,318	860	3,147	1,520	1,942
# of Control Points	25,727	20,787	20,154	69,350	80,580	66,910	159,895
Drawing Surface Size (mm)	2000 x 500	2000 x 500	1187 x 500	252 x 491	252 x 491	252 x 491	252 x 491
Execution Time (min.)	186	293	221	317	582	494	307

Bibtex

IEEE T-RO 2023, "SSK: Robotic Pen-Art System for Large, Nonplanar Canvas":

@ARTICLE{10114055,
    author={Song, Daeun and Park, Jiyoon and Kim, Young J.},
    journal={IEEE Transactions on Robotics}, 
    title={SSK: Robotic Pen-Art System for Large, Nonplanar Canvas}, 
    year={2023},
    volume={39},
    number={4},
    pages={3106-3119},
    doi={10.1109/TRO.2023.3268585}
}

IEEE ICRA 2019, "Distortion-free Robotic Surface-drawing using Conformal Mapping":

@inproceedings{song2019distortion,
    title={Distortion-free Robotic Surface-drawing using Conformal Mapping},
    author={Song, Daeun and Kim, Young J},
    booktitle={2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
    pages={627--633},
    year={2019},
    organization={IEEE}
}

IEEE ICRA 2018, "Artistic Pen Drawing on an Arbitrary Surface using an Impedance-controlled Robot":

@inproceedings{song2018artistic,
    title={Artistic pen drawing on an arbitrary surface using an impedance-controlled robot},
    author={Song, Daeun and Lee, Taekhee and Kim, Young J},
    booktitle={2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
    pages={4085--4090},
    year={2018},
    organization={IEEE}
}

Contact

Ewha Computer Graphics Lab

Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Ewha Womans University
📍 52, Ewhayeodae-gil, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea, 03760
📞 +82-2-3277-6798

✉️ Daeun Song¹, daeunsong@ewhain.net
✉️ Jiyoon Park¹, jiyoonpark13@ewhain.net
✉️ Young J. Kim¹, kimy@ewha.ac.kr
¹ Ewha Womans University, Korea