Disney Research has created, PaintCopter, a quadrotor drone 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. In addition to basic tasks, it’s capable of painting on a 3D structure, complete with a desired texture appearance. 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. Continue reading for more interesting images from around the web.
