Robotics Artistic Colorful Picture Drawing and Painting Using Visual Feedback Control System

In the decades, with the improvement of the living standards, people start pursuing high-level mental enjoyment. The applications of robots are not just limited in industrial purpose which aims to enhance the performance of production in factories. More and more research teams are devoted to the developments of modern and high-intelligence service robots. These robots not only provide different kinds of services, but also bring lots of recreational values to people. Moreover, some researches further break the image that science is stiff. They try to combine science and art together and sparkle new imaginations and amazement. The objective of this research is to integrate the idea of art into robotics applications and make a robot that can create artworks with artistic value just like human artists. In this research, we present two different styles of art. First, the Robot Artist uses mixed media to draw portraits which have hand-painted style. We emphasize on three main features of human portraits: color, silhouette and structure. The input image goes through different image processing steps to extract these features and combine together to form a NPR style image. The Robot Artist will draw the portraits based on this image using color crayons, oil painting brushes, turpentine, makers and technical pens. For the other style, the robot is further endowed with the capability of painting colorful pictures with a visual feedback control system. It can use only five basic colors to mix a variety of colors and repeatedly refine its artworks by comparing the current picture with the original image. We analyze the performance of our system and prove that the errors between two images would decrease effectively using our approach. The mixed colors is also limited in the range about 10% compared to the target color, which is acceptable with respect to our visual perception. In this research, the Robot Artist has successfully achieved the very first step of imitating the human artists and blur the line between human and machine creativity. We incorporate the artistic techniques and concept into robotic field and make the robot create artworks that are truly admired by people. More importantly, we not only present the competence of robots in artistic creation, but also provide a scientific perspective on the creation of art, which can help people learn the techniques of painting.