Geometric shape drawing using a 3 link planar manipulator

Abstract

Using manipulators to draw artistic figures is a benchmark problem in robotics. In this paper we describe a 3-link planar manipulator which draws artistic shapes or geometric shapes on a canvas. We first take a snapshot of the shape to draw from the camera and process it for finding the outer boundary or edges. The edges are mapped onto the drawing canvas. The edges are converted from Cartesian coordinate space to the configuration space of the manipulator. The joint trajectories so generated are passed to the controller as a trajectory input, which draws the shape using the end-effector or a marker in our case. Our manipulator is able to draw many shapes with high precision and speed.