STReet Art Drone – STRAD

STRAD aims at perfectly achieving, in a timely manner, a work signed by a renowned street artist on a high-rise building. Drones have been used for artistic purposes for less than a decade. The Paintcopter robot developed at ETHZ for spray-painting by drone has a tolerance of 5 cm and 5 deg with respect to the planned sketch. Its speed is notably limited by the non-holonomic nature of the quadcopter holding the spray nozzle. In this project we plan to modify an omnidirectional aerial manipulator developed recently at ICube Strasbourg, called dextAIR [www.dextair.com], so that it can carry actuated spray paint cans. High-speed visual servoing and nonlinear model predictive control will be used to accurately regulate the robot position with respect to a changing scene (the painting in progress) with a sub-centimeter accuracy and to control the color thanks to an image-based visual servoing of the painting process.