The name was inspired by the character in Cervantes' "Don Quixote". Cervantes' tale, among other things, is about dreams, inspiration and vitality in life. His character Dulcinea is a hard-working bar maid, but in Don Quixote's eyes she is a beautiful, fair maiden.

Dulcinea is a fully automated robot that creates paintings using a brush, paints and canvas. She operates continuously, changing paint colors and washing her brush between colors as needed, until a painting is completed.

The robot is a custom, gantry-style design, about eleven-feet high, ten-feet wide and weighing three thousand pounds. For manipulating the paint brush (as a human might) there are seven, high-performance, servomotors run by an Adept Technology robot controller. Housed in a six-foot high, electronic cabinet, along with the controller, are motor controls, power amplifiers, power supplies and assorted electronics. Mounted on a four-foot wide control-panel are various pneumatic controls for automated paint-vessel exchanges and brush-washing operations.

Adept's controller manages all operations of the robot work-cell. It has a real-time operating system, running three programs in parallel, using about 20,000 lines of custom code written in Adept's V+ programming language.

Dulcinea is designed to run continuously and unattended until a painting is completed. This could involve hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of brush strokes over the course of many hours to a few days of operation. After completing the final brush stroke of a painting, she returns the last paint vessel of color to its allotted, storage location, seals the paint from drying, washes her brush one last time, moves to her "home" location (the lower-left corner), and happily turns off her own power.

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