This work describes a Chinese character calligraphy robot that can be categorized as an art robot. The whole system consists of a calligraphy dictionary, robot arm, robot hand, writing brush and system controller. The calligraphy dictionary includes five styles of Chinese character image patterns written by famous calligraphers in Chinese history. When the character to be written and the style are given, the system starts to search the calligraphy dictionary, and outputs all image patterns registered in the dictionary for the assigned character. Then, the contour detection and thinning are performed, based on the character image pattern designated from the output image patterns. These two features, together with writing order information, are sent to the robot to write character as the human calligrapher does. The aim of this work is, firstly, to teach calligraphy skills to the robot, and secondly in turn, in order to preserve the character calligraphy culture, have the robot teach the beginner calligraphy skills |