A system for autonomous spray painting using a UAV, suitable for industrial applications. The PaintCopter is a quadrotor that has been custom fitted with an arm plus a spray gun on a pan-tilt mechanism. To enable long deployment times for industrial painting tasks, power and paint are delivered by lines from an external uni

PaintCopter

The PaintCopter is a quadrotor that has been custom fitted with an arm plus a spray gun on a pan-tilt mechanism. To enable long deployment times for industrial painting tasks, power and paint are delivered by lines from an external unit.This project enables sophisticated &nbsp;operations that subsumes the basic tasks, including painting on 3D structures, and &nbsp;painting of a desired texture appearance. &nbsp;The system operation consists of an offline component to capture a 3D model of the target surface, an offline component to design the painted surface appearance, and generate the associated robotic painting commands, and a live system that carries out the spray painting.&nbsp;The UAV hardware consists of a DJI Matrice 100 that is augmented with a custom arm and a spray gun mounted on a pan-tilt unit &nbsp;(PTU). &nbsp;The arm consists of three carbon fiber tubes in a triangular configuration, with 3D printed aluminum mounts. The PTU has two Dynamixel 3AX-12A servo motors to allow yaw ±90◦ and pitch ±45◦ control of the spray gun. An additional servo actuates the spray release, with controllable aperture between closed and open positions. A spring is placed at the end of the arm beyond the spray gun, to prevent damage in case of accidental contact with the &nbsp;painting &nbsp;surface.

Describes related work. Describes design and hardware, covers software architecture, control of the UAV and spray gun, and describes the full painting pipeline as a multi-stage mission.  Provides experimental
results.

PaintCopter: An Autonomous UAV for Spray Painting on 3D Surfaces.

Weight

Servo (PTU)

Computers

Sensor rig

A system for autonomous spray painting using a UAV, suitable for industrial applications. 

