Humanoid Robot Painter: Visual Perception and High-Level Planning

This paper presents visual perception discovered in high-level manipulator planning for a robot to reproduce the procedure involved in human painting. First, we apply a technique of 2D object segmentation that considers region similarity as an objective function and edge as a constraint with artificial intelligent used as a criterion function. The system can segment images more effectively than most of existing methods, even if the foreground is very similar to the background. Second, we propose a novel color perception model that shows similarity to human perception. The method outperforms many existing color reduction algorithms. Third, we propose a novel global orientation map perception using a radial basis function. Finally, we use the derived model along with the brush's position- and force-sensing to produce a visual feedback drawing. Experiments show that our system can generate good paintings including portraits.