A neural network controller for Cartesian Plotter

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a neural network controller capable of printing designs and drawings on paper using a Cartesian Plotter. The Cartesian plotter uses two dc motors with incremental encoders for motion along x and y-axis while third dc motor along z-axis controls the pen assembly for drawing the text and graphics data. The motion commands for the motors are generated with the help of a simple feed forward neural network controller trained with back propagation algorithm. The nine inputs, two output neural controller employs four neurons in the hidden layer with tangent sigmoid being activation function for hidden neurons while linear function is used for output neurons. The proposed neural controller can drive the pen assembly in one of the eight possible directions and thus produces similar results to the famous Bresenham's algorithm. Simulations and practical results validate the neural controller for use with Cartesian plotters.