Pen force emulating robotic writing device and its application

The paper describes our studies on the influence of physical and biomechanical processes on the ink trace and aims at providing a solid foundation for enhanced signature analysis procedures. By means of a writing robot, simulated human handwriting movements are considered to study the relation between writing process characteristics and ink deposit on paper. Since the robot is able to take up different writing instruments like pencil, ballpoint or fine line pen, the type of inking pen was also varied in the experiments. The results of analyzing these artificial ink traces contribute to a better understanding of the underlying interaction processes and find its applications in the teaching, training, and forensic investigation. It comes out that position, velocity and pen force suffice to produce high quality ink traces, hardly distinguishable from original probes.