Reproducing Handwriting with Position-Controlled Robots

Abstract

Testing the performance of touchscreen devices requires high accuracy and repeatability from the tester. This is why industrial robots can be considered excellent tools for this task. When performing end-to-end testing for touchscreen devices, realistic touch inputs have to be applied to the device under test. Simple inputs such as taps and swipes can be accomplished relatively easily with industrial robots. However, to test more complicated features, the robots should also be able to perform more complicated actions, such as handwriting. This introduces much bigger challenges for the test system. The goal of this project is to utilize an industrial robot to reproduce handwriting as accurately as possible. In addition to replicating the original pen path, the robot should also be able to replicate temporal qualities such as pen velocity in different points of the path. First of all, this project includes sampling real handwriting data in digital format. To improve the robot performance, the data has to be pre-processed in various ways. The data is then transmitted to the robot controller, which will replicate the sampled writing trajectories as well as possible. Lastly, the results have to be measured so that the performance of the system can be evaluated.