Towards robotic calligraphy

Although thousands of Chinese characters exist, they can be constructed from a limited number of single strokes. In Chinese calligraphy these strokes are combined into a full character in a fluid way. Therefore Chinese calligraphy provides an interesting problem to study learning mechanisms such as how to automatically construct complex tasks (full characters) from previously learned simpler ones (single strokes) (Fig. 1). The goal of this project is that a robot should be able to decide which previously learned strokes or characters to use for drawing a newly presented character and to improve its drawing over several iterations.