Painter Robot: Manipulation of Paintbrush by Force and Visual Feedback

In this paper, we describe a method to manipulate a paintbrush for a painting robot. The robot has multi-fingered hands and a stereo vision system. It grasps a paintbrush with its own hand and paints a picture on a canvas. Because a brush is deformable, adequate control of a paintbrush is a challenging task. It is necessary to develop several manipulation methods with feedback control using both vision and force sensors effectively. Our proposed method enables a robot to find a paintbrush, to grasp it, to detect contact between a brush and a canvas, and to draw various curves by changing parameters, such as pressure and lean angle. As experiments, an apple and a human silhouette are painted on a canvas using this painting robot.