Whenever I see an overpass or billboard that’s been tagged, I worry about the tagger and the danger they exposed themselves to in order to get that cherry spot. Perhaps this spray paint-toting drone developed by ETH Zurich and Disney Research will take some of the danger out of the hobby. It could also be used for murals and stuff, I guess.
Although it seems an obvious application in retrospect, there just isn’t a lot of drone-based painting being done out there. Consider: a company could shorten or skip the whole scaffolding phase of painting a building or advertisement, leaving the bulk of painting to a drone. Why not?
There just isn’t a lot of research into it yet, and like so many domain-specific applications, the problem is deceptively complex. This paper only establishes the rudiments of a system, but the potential is clearly there.
The drone used by the researchers is a DJI Matrice 1002, customized to have a sensing rig mounted on one side and a spraying assembly on the other, counterbalancing each other. The sprayer, notably, is not just a nozzle but a pan-and-tilt mechanism that allows details to be painted that the drone can’t be relied on to …read more
Source:: TechCrunch Gadgets
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