Painting With Robotic Arm

This project was created as a course assignment at the California State University, Long Beach; taught by Dr. Behnaz Farahi: DESN 490: Generative AI and Robotics.

For this project, our goal was to use CAD software and coding to convert a 2D image into a painting.

Team:

Ruby Macias

Christian Reyes

Midjourney

Rhino3D

Grasshopper

RoboDK

UR10e

Markers

Acrylic Paint

To start on this project, you want to either use google to look for he image you want to use for the robotic arm painting or you can use MidJourney to generate your own images. When downloading the wanted images, please make sure they are either saved/downloaded as a .jpg or .png photo.

(Note: the painting will work better if the images are patterns rather than an actual image/drawing)

When you open up Rhino3D. We needed to measure the media size of our canvas before setting up out images. Once the dimensions have been set up with in the surface area of Rhino, we started programing and setting up out images in Grasshopper

Experimenting the images that we downloaded/created earlier and adjusting the programming in Grasshopper, we concluded that the Voronoi abstract pattern yielded the results for the contour lines.

Finishing up with the Design in Rhino3D/Grasshopper, we transferred those designs into RoboDK to finalized the path of the robotic arm before we start setting up the media into the canvas.

For this process, we connected the media into the holder of the robot and adjust the Z-axis of the robotic arm since we do not want to ruin the canvas from the marker/paintbrush pressing to hard or having our media broken from the robotic arm.

When using a marker, you want to make sure the marker have a brush tip and is fresh since the tip of the marker will be more flexible and avoid having skip mark at the end result while having the fresh ink draw consistent dark lines.

For the painting process, you have to prepare the paint in advance since there is a possibility of the paint drying up onto the canvas. Also want to place more paint then expected since the process takes a while to finish the artwork and you do not want the paint to dry up when the brush hits its paths. As for or the paintbrush, its the same process as the paper but do not start the robot until the paint have been places onto the canvas.

After experimenting with different processes of using both paint and marker for this pattern, this is the final result. We started with magenta, purple, and dark grey painted on the first layer. We let the paint dry after the robotic arm went over it, then drew on a second layer but with a white oil paint marker. The contrast of the dark painted background with the white oil marking help pop out the abstract image.