Author Margaret Atwood was exhausted, having spent weeks on book-signing tours around the world.  She knew she could not keep up this pace for much longer.  During one such tour, a revelation came to the exhausted writer – a vision of a remote-controlled pen that would allow her to satisfy eager, autograph-seeking fans without requiring her to board planes and live out of hotels and suitcases.  But how was she to proceed?


With her first vision of the LongPen™ Freehand Script Robot in mind, Atwood teamed up with Matthew Gibson and formed Unotchit Inc. (pronounced “you no touch it”) in 2004.  The company began experimenting with ways to bring the idea to reality, which proved to be more complicated and challenging than anticipated.  Why?  The apparent ease with which humans move their hands to perform such deceptively simple tasks as signing a book is actually powered by complex movements that use 40 per cent of the brain’s capacity.  To replicate these movements requires the ability to precisely control the angle of joints and the pressure of fingertips on a hand that oscillates at 30 Hz and pulls at 6 to 9 Gs across space.  “We [initially] underestimated the technical difficulty in replicating what nature has taken a great deal of time to perfect,” Gibson, now Senior VP Operations, told Design Engineering magazine.


The technical staff at Quanser easily put together the following Quanser products to rapidly prototype the desired system and provide a proof-of concept: Q4 PCI Real-Time Controls Board, Quanser Power Amplifiers, and WinCon. The controller was designed and tuned within WinCon and interfacing with a tablet PC via the real-time shared memory calls allowed for the user to enter their signature and have it remotely written by the system.


Quanser used its rapid control prototyping and hardware-in-the-loop testing software, WinCon, to examine the mechanical design and resulting dynamic equations.  WinCon converts Simulink™ graphical control blocks into real-time code which simultaneously sends and receives command and measurement signals to the LongPen robot via Quanser’s unique controls hardware infrastructure.  Quanser’s advanced control schemes allowed Unotchit to keep the robot’s motor small.  Without those methods, mimicking complex hand movements would have required a powerful motor and resulted in an extremely bulky device.

The technical staff at Quanser put together the following Quanser products to rapidly prototype the desired system and provide a proof-of concept: Q4 PCI Real-Time Controls Board, Quanser Power Amplifiers, and WinCon. The controller was designed and tuned within WinCon and interfacing with a tablet PC via the real-time shared memory calls allowed for the user to enter their signature and have it remotely written by the system. Quanser can accomplish what standard automation and system integrator companies can’t.


Quanser’s advanced and innovative mechatronics development team was able to create a proof of concept in just three days.  Gibson was impressed with the way in which Quanser built on Unotchit’s initial designs.  “They took all of that work, extrapolated and built it into a rotary control instead of linear control – and made it smaller and faster,” Gibson told Design Engineering magazine.

By drawing upon its own in-house expertise and technology, Quanser was able to develop the initial proof-of-concept prototype into a final, tested design for production and then take it to full manufacturing within only a few months.  “The speed, accuracy and repeatability are incredible,” says Gibson.  “To accomplish this in such a short timeframe is remarkable.”

Equally important to Unotchit, Quanser was able to work with the company in a way that respected its intellectual property concerns.  Working with leading Toronto IP law firm Bereskin & Parr, Quanser was able to draft an agreement that respected the inherent Unotchit intellectual property while enhancing the value of the developed IP to the client.

On September 24, 2006, when the first transatlantic signing took place from Toronto, Atwood was able to realize her dream.  Now, thanks to advanced robotic technology, Atwood and other authors can autograph books for fans on the other side of the world using a tablet PC and an Internet connection.  A Unotchit robot, brought to life by Quanser’s innovative technology, signs the books on the other end.  Margaret Atwood and other high demand celebrities now have the option of trading in multi-day, multi-city book-signing tours for the comfort of their own home.


Founded in 1990, Quanser is a world leader in the innovation and development of advanced control systems for industry, education and research.  Quanser provides flexible, real-time solutions for complex control problems – from design to manufacture to OEM implementation – taking concepts, products and research to the leading edge.  Quanser’s flexible state-of-the-art control technology is currently employed worldwide in a diverse range of applications, including aerospace, robotics, medical assistive devices and the emerging field of haptics.