PaintCopter: An Autonomous UAV for Spray Painting on Three-Dimensional Surfaces
Abstract
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.
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From A Review on the Application of Blockchain to the Next Generation of Cybersecure Industry 4.0 Smart Factories (2019) · cites this paper as [144]
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From A Review on the Application of Blockchain to the Next Generation of Cybersecure Industry 4.0 Smart Factories (2019) · cites this paper as [144]
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- Authors
- Vempati, A. S., Kamel, M., Stilinovic, N., Zhang, Q., Reusser, D., Sa, I., Nieto, J., Siegwart, R., & Beardsley, P.
- Affiliations
- ETH Zurich (CH)
- Walt Disney (Switzerland) (CH)
- ORCID
- Venue
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
- Published
- 2018-10
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 2862-2869
- ISSN
- 2377-3766 (ISSN-L)
- 2377-3774
- OpenAlex
- W2807766400
- Cited by
- 60
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 11
- FWCI
- 5.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Robot Manipulation and Learning
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › UAV Applications and Optimization
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Robotics and Automated Systems
- Keywords
- unmanned aerial vehicles, quadrotor, robotic painting, 3D surface modeling, industrial painting
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