TSP-Bot: Robotic TSP Pen Art using High-DoF Manipulators

With the tremendous growth of digital technologies, digital art has become one of the largest art fields since the early 1960s. Early pioneers of digital art were not only artists but also engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians who challenged traditional art standards with new technologies. Typically, most of the work focuses on investigating the production of artistic images in virtual space, which enables a wide variety of expressive and aesthetic styles using computer algorithms. Traveling Salesman Problem Art, abbreviated as TSP art, is one of the representative examples of creating artistic work using computer algorithms. It was first invented by mathematician Robert Bosh \cite{kaplan2005tsp}, who wished to engage his students in optimization problems. TSP art is an art piece that represents the original digital image with piecewise-continuous line segments. It is obtained by first placing the points that reproduce the tonal quality of the image and then finding line segments (or paths) that visit once and every point by solving TSP, one of the most thoroughly studied optimization problems. TSP art involves not only the creative process of computer algorithms but also fits the nature of a robotic task, whose fundamental mission is to follow a path accurately and efficiently.