I sent robot forgeries to a handwriting expert
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- Опубліковано 25 вер 2023
- Create a FREE Onshape account at: Onshape.pro/StuffMadeHere
Download the part files for this project: tinyurl.com/plotterparts
Want to support these projects and get a robot postcard? patreon.com/stuffmadehere
(I'll be sending them out to new patrons as long as I can keep the robot running)
Special thanks to Ron Morris for taking the time to analyze a bunch of writing samples that I sent him. I got in touch with him after getting his textbook to learn more about the subject: www.amazon.com/dp/0124096026
This robot uses a tormach ZA6 to tend the writing robot: tormach.com/machines/robots.html
Heres the 3D printers we designed in onshape: hubs.ly/Q01RNGdr0
Machine learning Resources:
Generating Sequences with Recurrent Neural Networks: arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850
Code for Handwriting Synthesis with RNNs: github.com/sjvasquez/handwrit...
If you want to learn more about machine learning, this is a good overview that gets into the math behind them: • But what is a neural n...
Other stuff:
LSTM cell image By Guillaume Chevalier - File:The_LSTM_Cell.svg, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index... - Наука та технологія
Thanks to the generous support of patrons I've been able to move my shop multiple times with less fear of going bankrupt. I've been wanting to send out something cool as a way of saying thank you, which led to the creation of this robot. If you're interested in helping to support these projects you can join the patreon at patreon.com/stuffmadehere. I'm not sure how long this robot will work, but I'll be sending out postcards to new patrons until its inevitable demise...
Love your work bro 👏👏👏👏
How was this comment made before the video?
you are awesome hope u have a great and relaxing weekend with your family
@RanDix he had the video uploaded and set to private beforehand
Been waiting for his videos
I cant believe you managed to create machine learning code for doctors handwriting on the first try
thats really a world wide thing.
dude
a
Comment of the year.
...but he didn't. He used someone else's code.
It is really not difficult to know why people like your work: The experiments, the projects, the failures, the tips, the video and sound quality, and a lot of other reasons, makes them likeable. New sub here.
He even has custom animations!!
GREAT stuff.
I wish he could have a deeper level discussion of the code and other aspects for technical types.
Is anyone really going to talk about how the wife managed to correctly decipher every fake card despite not being completely obvious and apart manage to see the ploptwist of the last 4 letters? If she is not a detective then she is not in the right job
Glad I wasn’t the only one that had that on their mind. She definitely wife goals
@Zahir Montano Guess you don't know what acting is.
the wife is a robot he built
I'm surprised pen pressure on the paper wasn't more of a problem. Seems like the robots perfect line darkness would stand out more.
My guess is they actually talked about how good they were, and what we saw was what we were allowed to hear.
A very very few people in the world got what it takes to produce videos like this. Technical and theoretical knowledge, a good sense of humor, and video editing skills. this man deserves a medal!
i just googled for a tormach robot to see if i can get one lol
Begone verified holder
PhlyDaily??? What are you doing here?
I was looking too! 😆 But man.. $1000 bucks a month for two years... 18k one time payment, or $500 for 4 years, and $630 for 3.. INSANE!! but it would be nice to have a robot arm!..😂
Yeah me too $18,450 starter package !! But I still want one !
FINALLY. So glad to see another vid from you! You’re the most committed creator on this platform and I love your story telling / humor.
Bro 21 mins ago?
hey jake
Meme daddy???
Repent to Jesus Christ “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,”
Matthew 28:19 NIV
h
let me get a shout out
personally, i think the idea of you putting all of this work into a cool personalized project that can automatically write cards for people is more endearing than just writing a bunch of cards, because like anyone can do that. you put your own personal touch on the idea and that makes it special.
I love your videos! From the “wouldn’t it be easier to just write them out? - we don’t talk about that here.” To the way your wife interacts with you! Reminds me of my wife. I get the same exact look when she’s thinking “Stop being stupid!”. 😂
My favorite interaction is at around 17:50 :
Him: "I just want you to be proud of... "
Her: "- with your plumage?"
😂 Her deadpan delivery kills me, too
Your training process, and failures afterwards remind me of my early days in computers in high school. We "wrote" programs on a paper teletypewriter, using a computer program named BASIC. Each line was numbered, resulting in hundreds or thousands of lines of commands. The we hIt "RUN". and would wait to see what the computer would do. each run resulted in "successive approximations" until we got it to run. That was in 1973! Wow, I thought that those days were over! Great video.
If you did not watch this video's sponsor you are a monster. All of the hard work aside, the genuine explanation and request to just hear out the sponsored content was so pure I ended up making 3 accounts with Onshape.
My first time ever on this channel. I just love so much when I see someone doing exactly what they were put on this earth to do. This is as perfect as a UA-cam video gets. Bravo 👏🏼
What I learned from this channel over the years is that in order to do less work you have to do more work than you originally had to.
because it’s only ever less work for future you never present you
a
It's just converting the work into other work that you like more. In this case he could just suck it up and write them out, or he could make a machine to do, that he not only is much more suited too, but also enjoys it's and allows him to hone his craft.
Initially
one time investment basically
Before the forensic part, I assume pressure levels will do too constant over all the letters, you don’t always push with the same amount of force, sometimes letters come out lighter or thicker because of that and I didn’t see that accounted for
Your videos have great quality! Ron in a follow up video will be seen for the first time in this way. His work can be introduced to all of us!
"if you're wondering whether this is more work than just writing out the cards... We don't talk about that around here."
As a software developer/automator... This really hit home.
I can't tell you how many times I've spent a few hours automating a process that only takes 10 minutes...
It's not about the time or the work, necessarily... It's so satisfying to finally get some automation to work, even if it's not going to bring huge gains in efficiency
Well maybe all these „unnecessary“ struggels for automation, will eventually end up in general AI with a humanoid robot body capable of doing just anything automatically a human can.
Even repair or build an other humanoid robot. This would be the final automation of everything roughly speaking….
Work smarter AND harder
I am thrilled to know I'm not the only one who spends hundred hours to save 15 minutes.
@Thomas King we're not alone. There are dozens of us. DOZENS!
Hahha yesssssss - I need this as a meme I can deploy all the time!
It is truly impressive how human beings can recognize legitimate writing through participant observation. What if you reverse the process and create a robot that identifies a false signature or writing instead of the script learning machine?
excellent work congratulations
Your videos always ignite the spark in me to be an inventer ,and push me to learn further
Miss you man. But I know you will be worth the wait! You're an amazing engineer!
this was literally the thing i wanted the most as a kid since i hated writing homework. you are bringing my dreams to life dude
it shocks me how amazing your videos are sir, just way above the bar my friend. i love making my 10 year old daughter watch these with you. she says she doesnt want to watch but wont let me skip or change to another video... lol. top tier content every time, that i can not only watch with my child but its inspiring to both of us. Well done sir
The fact that she figured out it was all fakes is poetic almost, machine learning vs gut feel lmao
You know you're an engineer when you spend hundreds of hours designing and building a custom solution to do a simple menial task
In fainress he actually ended up just using someone else's code on someone else's robot. All he did was feed it paper with a second robot.
@Thunder he also handed the robot a pen haha. Seriously though he did engineer the trays to hold the cards, the system for picking them up and dropping them, the system for holding the cards for the writing bot and integrated those 2 robots together with the code etc. so it's not quite as easy but yeah.
Giving up and using an existing code base is actually very typical of engineers in other jobs too lol.
I feel like I am cut out to be an engineer then, since I have ocd and I have spent hundreds of hours during my free time, to optimize my free time, so I have more free time. No joke.
@BrionDaLionif you are old enough to go university, give it a shot. You can't be a certified engineer without an engineering degree.
I'm a software developer and I have a job and that job often makes me do tasks that take hundreds of hours only for no one to use it.
I believe the biggest give away to the robot cards is the indentation of the writing. It would be uniform across every letter/word where if handwritten some letters would be more indented into the paper and others raised up higher.
This is the first video of yours I have ever seen and I couldn't stop watching! This is just amazing! I loved watching this. Great work!
These animations are amazing! Can’t image how much work went into this video.
I like how accurately you describe what its like to be an engineer; often painful, with great moments of elation and joy when you're finally successful.
Ive worked on quite a few ML projects, and i can totally relate to how annoying it can be to iterate through the process with how long training can take.
I must have said "this guy is a genius" under my breath at least 50 times while watching this. Every project you do just blows me mind - thank you! And yes, PLEASE do the video you teased about the interview with the handwriting expert!
I just wanna say that I frickin love your videos, and I always look forward to the next one. You are literally living and doing my dream job, and it makes me want to set-aside more time in my life to work on that long list of side projects that I have always wanted to work on. Thank you Stuff Made Here
This video is the embodiment of "we do things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were"
and we make necessary concessions when we realize it was a little bit too not-easy
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because we thought they were!" - JFK, 2023
@The Night Jackal yea but budget doesn't change 😭😂
lmao 🤣
🎶WE DO WHAT WE MUST BECAUSE WE CAN! 🎶
I had an idea like this when I was younger. I wanted to be able to type my essays and print in handwriting. I am happy to see someone actually made it work.
I have to say this channel is really one that makes me feel like i did as a kid when I think about Engineering. Thank You for that.
Not over engineered at all... lol
Great video, really enjoyed it. I've actually been using a Cricut with a pen and handwriting font to write Holiday Cards and Labels for a few years now. Surprisingly it fooled a lot of people, however, it wouldn't fool me let alone a forensic expert.
Wow, I am very impressed. I don't know how much patience you have and don't give up after a lot of errors. You are a perfect example of hard work ❤
You should send these to "handwriting experts" who think they can get insights into a persons personality or backstory from their handwritting.
You'd want to ridicule them?
Anyone writing each letter individually and not joining them up is sure to be a psychopath
Ok, one major tip: natural hand writing is in fact a 3D action not just 2D, meaning that the writer exerts higher and lower pressure vertical to the paper surface as they write, which results in the pen line becoming thinner and thicker at different sections of a letter! Next try to build the Y-axis movement into that robot!!
Brutal
Or the microscopic human skin flakes and grease we leave on the paper while writing?
Yes I thought the handwriting expert would make this point. Maybe the robot does press more in some places?
I was about to suggest the same haha
Not only the pressure of the pen but angle of the pen too (or rather two angles) and the writing speed.
Great video, and I like how you always give credit when credit is due, which shows your ethics. 😊 great video, keep up the good work. 👍🏽
the fails are always the best parts 😁 did you really have the confidence on every try to run a 46h training or is it for the show...being able to iterate quickly is key when you're trying new stuff. I know that feeling "this time's the one. OK one more"
This is probably the best visual description of gradient descent I've seen! Awesome video!!
the suction cups at approx 8:25 are a VERY similar concept to how Bell and Howell MailStar 500 mail insertion machines work. They use a suction arm to pull the envelope open, then a jet of air to puff the envelope open.
Have you considered building a swarm of 3D printers? If you could coordinate them and solve the refill problem, you could get around the size limits on 3D printed houses. Speed can be controlled by adding more bots for larger projects and without the large crane to move the print head, it would lower the cost of entry for contractors and enthusiasts. Plus there's all the other potential applications for Art, sidewalks, monolithic archit.... eh never mind. 😅
just a tip when using neural networks. In the video, I noticed after every bug you fixed, the editing at least made it look like you spent ~50 hours training the RNN again. Usually, you can use smaller datasets to train the networks and see if the output is slightly acceptable before spending the 2 days training the network with the full dataset.
Bingo
I also notice he didn't plot his training loss / validation loss. It's very important to be able to know if both are decreasing, otherwise you might just be overfitting to noise or something. 😆
a
@Fity Bux Also in realtime, to see if it is worth waiting another 50 hours
Or, just invest in better/more GPUs
9:30 the subtle pan out to “that would be over engineered” reminding us of the steps undergone to solve this ‘problem’ is a great punchline.
This is incredible, I'm a musician and in college my professor made us turn in all of our compositions with hand-written scores. HOURS of writing and hand cramps, this would have been amazing.
Congratulations on finally finding out that your wife is not defective. If only you had this project as an excuse years earlier! In all seriousness, this is an intriguing project. Years ago, I started reading a book about the psychology of handwriting. Whilst I never finished reading the book, I do, however, remember some of how handwriting differs between introverts, extroverts, etc and men and women. The intricacies experts can pick up on is amazing, so the fact that your machine(s) yielded such convincing results is a huge win.
The next big step would be to expand the program to allow it to write as different personalities. Please don't do that though, as you've gone far enough down this rabbit hole. 😆
Anyway, I'd love to see you collaborate with the likes of The Hacksmith, Smarter Every Day, and/or Linus Tech Tips. The wealth of knowledge, skill, and expertise on UA-cam is astounding. We need someone to coordinate a big collab project, but a project that makes a difference - not just simply content and clicks.
That was a remarkable description of machine learning. I've tried to explain it without math but my explanation was not nearly as good as that.
“If I’m going to commit fraud, I’m going to do it properly.”
Haha! Love your channel. The way you question things as well as how you approach each problem is both fascinating and entertaining.
I love the field of Computer Science.
Spending 4 months to create something to do a 3 hour task for me just gives such a huge feeling of accomplishment.
Until a year later when you need to do the task 10,000 times. Or 1M times.
thats how mostly any machine got made.
There's two reasons why investing a lot of time to gain small benefits:
- If you repeat the task, there will come one point where your work amortizes itself
- You probably invest all the time (i.e. 12 hours for 10 minutes faster tasks) at a point where you have it available and you also have fun with it. I've done the same for my collagues with some forms - they may only save a couple of minutes but we all get done faster and have less repetitive tasks since they're done automatically.
in my junior year of hs i had an obsession with writing code to basically make specialized calculators for whatever we were doing in math. definitely spent more time on making those programs than time i would've spent actually doing the work, but it was fun lol
This really gave me a mood boost as a starter CS student
I can’t imagine how much time you put to craft those awesome videos! Amazing!
In the '90's I had a plotter, mixed half a dozen handwriting fonts, and tweaked the baseline shift, and baseline tilt to make writing indistinguishable from... plotted text.
I love his wife’s facial expressions. It’s just the look of someone who loves a benign lunatic genius.
hello Shane,
I find this video really interesting.
I was thinking one thing that machines do not take into consideration is- how we change our handwriting at the starting edge of the page in comparison to the ending edge of the page. I am of the view that our moods, feelings too affect them. Also may be subconsciously we try to cram in more words at the ending edge or just squish the word towards the end; may be that is something handwriting experts consciously or subconsciously look into the handwritings.
Nice job. You should have looked for previous solutions to feeding cards as well. Printing presses have had automatic feeders for over 150 years that are not that hard to implement and would give a solution that would precisely position any size and kind of paper. I would have used parts from an old printer.
The amazing thing is that Shane could get a high level job literally anywhere but he'd rather do his own stuff like this. And that makes him awesome
i think it's a little naive to think this guy doesn't have a job
@Dylan L a little?
@Aonodensetsu I was trying to be nice
4.21 million subscribers definitely help. Hell, people with 75k subscribers are quitting their jobs and doing UA-cam full time. Shane has it made and we’re all here for it!
His job is inventing, " He is an inventor with five patents and 13 pending applications. " -wikipedia
I appreciate you including all the results of the errors. Many of the products made by engineers are the result of numerous tries and experiments. It is a tedious yet crucial step in the process. Negative outcomes may not be fun but they are vital because they only help us become better learners.
Keep it up, your stuff is awesome!! Excited for more to come
This fella is simply brilliant. I came upon his channel just today, but what is clear to see is that he is someone who has a great intellect that walks hand in hand with curiosity. Great stuff.
Super cool! My question is, how many pens did it take? Did any run dry in the middle of production?
Thanks for the introduction to Onshape, I have been looking for a good 3D platform to develop my CAD-skills, definitely going to try it out! Other than that; what an amount of time wasted, but what a knowledge gained! Way to go!
Honestly I think that having a postcard written by a project you made is way cooler than having one hand written
He bought the robot online and copy pasted the code for the program, he didn't do anything for the final product.
@Hans Wurst he made the suction things also combining two things different things to do one thing is harder then it looks
Beep bop... I'm the Philosophy Bot. Here, have a quote:
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate"
~ Carl Jung
Sup bro. I love your channel and your machines and process of making them. It feels like you understand my struggles when making college projects.
I have currently just finished my college career at Mechatronics Engineering and would like to specialize on something that would help me build robots like you. I love to draw I love to design and I love building ideas so, any suggestions?
They called him a mad man but he kept going and made all these master pieces
That feels like a nice generative deep learning exercise.
Might have been interesting to look into generative adversarial RNN approaches, with one generative network (similar in architecture to the paper shown in video), and two discriminators, one to critique whether the handwriting does indeed "look like handwriting", and the other to critique whether the handwriting does indeed "have the same letters as the example word". A weighted average of both discriminator outputs can be used as the loss for the generator.
Though the purpose of the video is probably to get something working, rather than to do AI research
Respect for your work and creativity! You're one of my favorite UA-cam channels and I love your videos.
Trained as a mechanical engineer 40 years ago - despite afterwards working in another field your videos resonate with the engineer's heart that still beats within. Thank you!
yesssssss!
I just really appreciate todays sponsor.
Finding free CAD software is hard to come across.
bros pay to win
As someone who almost exclusively uses solid works for school and work, I’ve been really happy with Onshape for some of my home CAD projects. Being able to create a CAD model while measuring the garden faucet is a big game changer.
Reminds me of the old-school drafting printer we had in school, that handled huge sheets of paper. It was like this, but at least 5 or 6 times larger.
It had an arm and a bunch of different coloured pens, and drew each line one-by-one. It would go fast, fast, slow. Stop in weird places and continue in other weird places. Was a lot of fun to watch.
I would have thought that you would also have to vary the pen pressure to ensure it looks natural.
Theres litterally a website that can turn your handwriting into a font with multiple variations, it's called calligrapr, i used it to type school papers that I was supposed to write.
I once worked for a law office in Beverly Hills that had a copier that was the size of a city block. It had a suction thing similar to what you're doing there. Very interesting. By any chance, is that where you got the idea?
My favorite part of this channel is how you show yourself making mistakes, finding the error, and trying again. Over and over and over.
You're inspiring.
As a full time programmer, that "But why!?!?" - "Ooooh..." really made me nod and giggle haha
Lol yea makes me feel fine about my work process 😅
we're not alone 😭
My favourite part is your comment!!!!
Jesus loves you alot trust in His death 4 salvation and be saved from eternal hell
His intelligence is on par with his electricity bill. Love your videos and approach towards solutions!
There is a display, or at least there was, at the Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company headquarters in Milwaukee WI that included a device that held 4 desk fountain pens connected to one another. It was used in the early part of the 20th century to speed up signing checks.
Interesting video, especially the effort to find a program to simulate handwriting.
Idk why I just had this idea but of all people who could pull it off it would be you, but you should make one of those paint pendulum setups but have it so you can “print” a picture with solenoid paint droppers attached to the end of the pendulum. As you push the pendulum around it will apply the specific color to the correct position ultimate ending in what I can only assume would be the coolest painting/ art piece.
Lines seem pretty straight horizontally to be hand written, especially considering there are no lines on the post card.
Is it possible to randomly make lines of writing trail off slightly or have some letters randomly higher or lower than others?
One way to reduce the iteration time for ML models is to try overfitting on a single batch. If you can train on say 4 examples and the model training are configured correctly, it should be able to predict those 4 examples perfectly with a reasonably small number of iterations, so you can identify bugs much faster before doing a full 46 hour training run.
Not sure if this applies to your issue or not but thought I’d mention it. This is taken from Andrej Karpathy’s Recipe for training neural networks. Cheers
I have to say, one of the most helpful parts of your video was when you gave up and used code off the internet. It's nice to see others realize that some other people just do things better sometimes and you don't have to re-invent the wheel every single project. Buying a plotter, borrowing code. This is how things move forward. Good luck in your new shop!
That's how science and engineering works. You use what other people have done in the past to create something new.
Anyone have tips on how to do this more? I often feel like I'm spending just as much time figuring out how to integrate or implement their code into mine. I suppose that's just down to the quality of the documentation?
yeah, I started writing a custom library for playing audio files in vanilla JS, and then I thought "wtf am I doing - just find an open source one". And lo and behold, there are like 5 of them.
@Emerson Peters Be sure of what you need. Once you know what goes in and what goes out you can use other works as a black box. GPT can also help with code integration nowadays.
That is why i share every line of my codes to github... it feels great to see someone uses something you did and turn it into something more useful 😂
I was hoping you would go more into the actual mechanics of penmanship since the ML and graphical/font side of this is likely been researched quite a bit. As a dynamic font the results were great but still the giveaway to me was the super consistent perpendicular constant pressure strokes. Wouldve been cool to see u tackle variable stroke tilt, speed, presssure mechanics. The tapered stroke you get from the flick of a pen is completely absent.
@StuffMadeHere I want to see you make a robot capable of out drumming a professional drummer. That would be cool AF.
As you were working through the problem of stacking cards for the robot to pick up I paused and thought of two solutions, 1. The simple caveman way, measure the height of a card, count the number in your stack and then have the computer loop trough the stack of cards, lowering itself by one cards height each time. (clearly not a good solution) 2. Make a trigger for the robot arm, a simple piece of metal and a spring to detect distance from the target, slowly lower from max stack height until the trigger is pressed(good but it requires a mechanical trigger which can fail, and a user may put a stack that is too large into the stack. I cant believe I didn't consider a spring loaded platform to move the cards up as they are taken from the stack. This is clearly the best way, the same way plates are dispensed at a buffet.
Can I ask what you used to let the arm know it's safe to pickup? And then subsequently when it's safe to start writing? Fun video thank you so much for sharing!!
Garbageosity is the best description I've heard for training and tunning a net🤣🤣
And wow, those animations are amazing! I mean everything is great, but you set very high standards every time!
Your video and editing skills are coming such a long way.
Nice
Good...
Hai
The production on this vid was way way ahead of what I remember seeing from him. Agree.
Nice👍👍👍👍
I just want to say that this is so entertaining! Thanks for sharing your passion
I am proud of the fact that I understand everything you were doing before you explained it. I earned my own POB. Well done, well done, well done.
I was looking for videos to learn how to make pcb circuits and ended up here. I may need to go on a long vacation and recup the brain power that was used trying to understand how someone could create all the things in this video that you have. Brilliant video.
..also i wanted to say that i'm time and time again impressed by your skills. I sometimes daydream about you youtubers doing a collab one day to make a world peace machine.. or some free energy magic that solves so many problems.. it feels good to know that people like you exist :)
There's a few things to consider different when writing and having a machine copy it. People tend to compress the letters as they get to the right side of the page to make sure they have enough room to finish the word. And hand fatigue kicks in after a few paragraphs, making it not as tidy as when started.
I love how the wife is always so unimpressed 🤣🤣🤣 she is honestly one of my favorite parts of this channel.
IMO these videos would not really work nearly as well without her
Some other guys plumage doesn’t impress her.
I was going to say the same, her reactions really make me laugh
His wife is my favorite minor character on UA-cam
Clearly defective😂
When I need things like this, open source projects are tlmy starting place. This genius reads white papers and designs things from scratch! (...at least at first.)
(I regularly find myself wishing I was this guy, haha.)
Years ago I came across a magazine article that pointed out how often couples (especially married ones) look alike. It went on to say the reason for this is because we -humans (subconsciously) like how we look and seek out members of the opposite sex who look like us. These two are the quintessential example of this; they look like twins. Interesting and a bit spooky.
Thanks for the tutorial bro! I sent in some items signed by MJ and LeBron for authentication, and they actually passed. I'll probably list them online.
Love your stuff that is made here sooo much! Thank you for your absolute brainblasting content!!
May I ask you what your profession is?
Greetings from austria ✌️
“If this thing had a body, I would attack it” spoken like a true coder.
Soo true
😂 fr
ok
That part made me laugh so hard!
I would be arrested for crimes against humanity if solidworks had a body.
Good to see you back on a project! And respect for the attempt to try implementing machine learning yourself while all the world talks about advanced machine learning tools that are ready to use. This was a great video, entertaining and educational. Love your style. Also, I'd love to hear more about detecting handwriting forgeries, though it probably does not fit this channel.
"ready to use" is a bit generous.
On shape looks really interesting, you sold me on it. I'm a cnc machinist and it looks very neat and useful.
Onshape is very very fun to use. It was designed by the creators of SolidWorks, so it functions closest to that as a cad tool.
This is actual R&D. See how much cost and effort itvtakes. Great video
I tried to do something like this once. I used a digitizer to accurately locate points on a real signature then fed those into a plotter to draw a copy of the signature. It failed because the pen would pause slightly at each point causing a little more ink to soak into the paper there. I'm sure better ink and paper would have helped but I imagine a handwriting analyst would take ink & paper into account too. I imagine using the wrong ink & paper for autosigning would make genuine signatures that much more authentic.