Region-Based Approaches in Robotic Painting

An important aspect of robotic painting is replicating human painting techniques on machines, in order to automatically produce artwork or to interact with a human painter. Usually, painterly rendering techniques are transferred to the machine, and strokes are used as the basic building block of an image, as they can easily be mapped to the robot. In contrast, we propose to consider regions as a basic primitive to achieve more human-like results and to make the painting process more modular. We analyze the works of Kadinsky, Mondrian, Delaunay, and van Gogh to show the basis of region-based techniques in the real world and then transfer them to an automatic context. We introduce different types of region primitives and show procedures for how to realize them on our painting machine e-David, capable of painting with visual feedback. Finally, we present machine-created artwork by painting automatically generated sets of shapes in the styles of various artists.