Wall-Climbing Robot Does the Labor of Painting Giant Murals

Giant wall-size murals are a very cool, time-honored accoutrement for creative spaces like art galleries, coffee shops, and tattoo parlors. But, commissioning a mural from a professional artist is very expensive. And, rightly so — the artist is painting a massive one-off piece of work. It’s not as if they can sell prints to lower unit costs.

That means that a business has to have the budget to cough up a lot of cash, in order to give their establishment that cool art house vibe. Or, that was the case until now, because Estonian tech startup SprayPrinter has demonstrated their prototype mural-painting robot on a chimney stack in Tartu, Estonia. The robot works by scampering up the tower on cords, and spray paints as it goes. In this case, painting a 98-foot tall mural of a girl holding a potted plant.

The robot is programmed with laser-engraving G-code, which was an interesting (but effective) choice. This allowed for easy X/Y movements, without unused Z movements. The robot carries 5 cans of spray paint in a variety of colors, and the color is chosen based on the pulse width of the laser control. When the G-code is made by CAM software, this pulse width translates to the power of the laser, which is determined by the photo that was input. A stronger pulse width would mean a darker color, so the system takes advantage of this fact to choose what color to use.

The advantage is that the SprayPrinter team didn’t have to write custom software for producing G-code, they could just use software that’s already readily available. With the prototype a success, they expect to do a limited production run of units by the end of the year. Maybe that mural on the side of your record store won’t be so expensive after all.