Robot Calligraphy

Introduction:

The Robot Calligraphy is an App for enabling UR5 to perform traditional Chinese calligraphy. It includes the writing paths extracting module and writing controlling module. The stroke order information and writing paths are obtained from Chinese character teaching GIFs (https://www.hanzi5.com/).

Extraction Procedure:

The extraction module transfers each GIF of its corresponding target Chinese character to an array of JPGs; then it discards JPGs that contain incomplete stroke. Then it would apply gaussian blur to eliminate noises and call the CV2 inrange method to separate stokes with red coloring. It would then use Zhang-Suen thinning to get the thinned image and apply BFS on each pixel to get the stoke's width at that location. The stroke order and writing direction information contained in these GIFs would also be extracted.

Control:

Control: calligraphy.robot_writing_logics would create control points of UR5 tool trajectory for the real world calligraphy.robot_writing_logics would call easy_ur5.py as API to control the real robot The velocity of tool trajectory is calculated in easy_ur5.py

Setup:

step 1: Download this repository to your PC

git clone https://github.com/cookythecat/robot-calligraphy.git

step 2: Download data folder from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EykHtbVGWC1fR7g0C8apqqDcy9ovpkrc/view?usp=sharing. You can directly use data.json as the writing path library for robot calligraphy performance. If you want to try the extraction algorithm or want bigger writing paths lib, You can do it by using cv.py (you can find a GIFs library with 20000+ GIFs from the data folder). Unzip the data.zip file and put the data folder directly under the root of the project.

step 3: Dependencies This implementation requires the following dependencies:

• numpy~=1.16.5
• Dopencv-python~=4.4.0.44
• pillow~=6.2.0

you can try:

pip install -r requirement.txt

Running Guidelines:

Extraction:

Run <your workspace>\cv\cv.py If you want to see thinned image, input 'yes'

show image? 
Please enter yes or no: yes  

If you don't want to see thinned image, input 'no'

show image? 
Please enter yes or no: no  

NOTICE: data.json would be rewritten once you run cv.py; So if you want to use the default data.json provided by us, you need to copy data.json from your downloaded data folder to <your workspace>\data\.

Performance:

Run <your workspace>\calligrahpy\robot_writing_logics.py, input the size of the character you would like your UR5 to write; Also input the scale factor (a float value, you can try 0.0004 first and then fine-tune this value)

C:\Users\cooky\Anaconda3\python.exe C:/Users/cooky/PycharmProjects/robotCalligraphy/calligraphy/robot_writing_logics.py
input a string you want to write: 测试
input scale (you can try 0.0004 first): 0.0004

If the local machine cannot connect to your UR5, Please make sure the HOST constant variable in <your workspace>\calligraphy\easy_ur5.py matches your robot's HOST.

License

MIT