Have you ever painted a wall in your home? Perhaps you were coating the baby’s room in pink or blue, or you thought the dining room would look pretty in sunshine yellow. If you have the experience of painting a room by yourself, you know how difficult it can be. Sometimes the paint is too runny and keeps dripping before it’s dry, and sometimes it’s too gloppy and doesn’t look smooth. Other times, you can’t fit your brush into all the little nooks and crannies of the room. And you can pretty much toss your brush out the window if you have carpeted floors. But there seems to be a solution in sight for all your house-painting woes. Mist recently unveiled a robot that can seemingly slap paint up on your walls in such professional fashion that you’ll never throw up your paint-covered hands and call the house painters ever again.
With the help of mapping technology and a robotic neck that moves up and down, this robot will spray paint up and down your walls until the entire surface is coated in your desired color. Mapping the room allows the robot to hit all the spots that require paint and avoid the spots that don’t, although you would probably still want to take precautions and apply tape or protection on windows and upholstery. The team of designers that dreamed up this machine is based at the University of Waterloo, and the finished prototype is called Maverick. According to the team, this is only the beginning of what Maverick will eventually be able to do.
“We actually plan on mounting a camera behind the sprayer so that it follows the sprayer up and down, and hence can use image processing to make decisions about whether to actuate the spray or not. We’ve already implemented this logic in software and even have a paint quality detection algorithm. That being said, we haven’t mounted the camera just yet as seen in this video,” the team told TechCrunch.
In the time it would take for you to visit the paint store, attempt to paint a wall, and cry when it doesn’t look right, Maverick could probably paint your entire house.
