Robot Calligraphy using Pseudospectral Optimal Control in Conjunction with a Novel Dynamic Brush Model

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach to robot calligraphy that combines pseudospectral optimal control with a dynamic virtual brush model, enabling efficient and aesthetically pleasing Chinese character writing.

Contribution

It introduces a new dynamic virtual brush model and applies pseudospectral optimal control to optimize robot calligraphy trajectories for the first time.

Findings

Achieves high-quality calligraphy with improved efficiency

Enables real-time closed-loop control of robot calligraphy

Demonstrates superior aesthetic results compared to previous methods

Abstract

Chinese calligraphy is a unique art form with great artistic value but difficult to master. In this paper, we formulate the calligraphy writing problem as a trajectory optimization problem, and propose an improved virtual brush model for simulating the real writing process. Our approach is inspired by pseudospectral optimal control in that we parameterize the actuator trajectory for each stroke as a Chebyshev polynomial. The proposed dynamic virtual brush model plays a key role in formulating the objective function to be optimized. Our approach shows excellent performance in drawing aesthetically pleasing characters, and does so much more efficiently than previous work, opening up the possibility to achieve real-time closed-loop control.