Footprint analysis of brush-pen is an important part of studying Chinese drawing and painting. The designed platform is capable to capture and analysis of the brush footprint in real-time. Transparent drawing plate and an underneath camera system are installed, together with projective rectification and video segmentation algorithms, analog footprint can be transformed to digital data. Both non-parametric and parametric modeling on the captured footprint data will be explored in this thesis. Dynamics and time-delay will also be studied. The results are demonstrated by producing a well-known Chinese calligraphy in our study. / Robot drawing is an integrated study in the fields of robotics, machine intelligence, genetic algorithms (GA), rule base techniques, and expert system, etc. Besides looking into sophisticated methods in manipulator planning and control, robot drawing also aims to fulfill a human desire to put creativity in machines and to explore a basic question: can art be programmed? In this thesis, we report on the design and construction of a robot platform in our laboratory geared toward the production of Chinese painting and calligraphy which we will use to explore some of the above issues. / This thesis aims to report on the design and development of a robot drawing platform supporting a pen motion with five degrees of freedom (x, y, and z translation, z-rotation, and pitch) of a brush-pen motion in our laboratory. The platform is interfaced with a camera system and a writing tablet via a window based PC. The integration programming language is Visual Basic 6, with direct access to MATLAB for image processing and the needed computation. The objective of design is to have a platform that is highly accurate and repeatability, easy to command, versatile and user friendly, etc. / This thesis also describes the addition of vision-based capabilities in the platform. Those vision feedback measures have to be calibrated by using optimization method or Genetic Algorithm. Various examples of how the vision information can be used to improve various aspects of the drawing quality in iterative drawing will be demonstrated. / by Lo, Ka Wah. / "August 2007." / Adviser: Yan Yeung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: B, page: 1285. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-147). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.