# Spline-FRIDA: Towards Diverse, Humanlike Robot Painting Styles with a Sample-Efficient, Differentiable Brush Stroke Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RoboSVG: A Unified Framework for Interactive SVG Generation with Multi-modal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22684/) (2025)
- [Birth of a Painting: Differentiable Brushstroke Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13191/) (2025)
- [Data-Efficient Brushstroke Generation with Diffusion Models for Oil Painting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01103/) (2026)
- [IMPASTO: Integrating Model-Based Planning with Learned Dynamics Models for Robotic Oil Painting Reproduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29315/) (2026)
- [Bridging Online and Offline Handwriting via Differentiable Physical Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03198/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A painting is more than just a picture on a wall; a painting is a process comprised of many intentional brush strokes, the shapes of which are an important component of a painting's overall style and message. Prior work in modeling brush stroke trajectories either does not work with real-world robotics or is not flexible enough to capture the complexity of human-made brush strokes. In this work, we introduce Spline-FRIDA which can model complex human brush stroke trajectories. This is achieved by recording artists drawing using motion capture, modeling the extracted trajectories with an autoencoder, and introducing a novel brush stroke dynamics model to the existing robotic painting platform FRIDA. We conducted a survey and found that our open-source Spline-FRIDA approach successfully captures the stroke styles in human drawings and that Spline-FRIDA's brush strokes are more human-like, improve semantic planning, and are more artistic compared to existing robot painting systems with restrictive B'ezier curve strokes.