PaintCopter: An Autonomous UAV for Spray Painting on Three-Dimensional Surfaces

This letter describes a system for autonomous spray painting using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), suitable for industrial applications. The work is motivated by the potential for such a system to achieve accurate and fast painting results. 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. The ability to paint planar surfaces, such as walls in single color, is a basic requirement for a spray painting system. But this work addresses more sophisticated operation that subsumes the basic task, including painting on three-dimensional (3D) structure, and painting of a desired texture appearance. System operation consists of (a) an offline component to capture a 3D model of the target surface, (b) an offline component to design the painted surface appearance and generate the associated robotic painting commands, and (c) a live system that carries out the spray painting. Experimental results demonstrate autonomous spray painting by the UAV, doing area fill and versatile line painting on a 3D surface.