Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objective: Exterior wall painting is one of the major tasks in con-struction field. For apartment building exterior wall painting is risky. Painter will be hanging on the wall with support of rope. While painting the painter has to slide down carefully, even sometimes need to move left and right along the wall. There is a chance of falling if not alert. Method: In this paper, research is carried out for development of exterior wall painting robot (PAINTBOT-EW). Hardware is divided into two sectors, robot and suspension system. Robot is fabricated by attaching paint feed roller to the frame. DC motor drives the roller ver-tically up and down on the frame using rotating disc and connecting rod. Robot is connected to the cables at top right and left corners. The other ends of cables are connected to DC geared motors through the pulleys mounted on the wall at required distance. UI part includes cre-ating Graphical User Interface (GUI) in MATLAB, coding the program and to control the movement of the robot using Arduino Uno. Find-ings: From experiments it is observed that painting robot covers 2 square feet area of wall approximately in 34 mins as the stroke length of the roller is found to be 28 cm. Alignment of robot while moving from one co-ordinate to other may vary but once it reaches the required co-ordinate it aligns itself straight. Motors which were fixed to the robot for movement; in earlier, robot was attached to the ground in order to reduce vibrations generated in robot. As well as continuous paint flow is maintained while painting using pump which is not possible in case of compressor used in earlier robot. Applications: Wall painting is carried out with 65% reduction in cost along with reduction in vibrations generated in the earlier model.. 
Keywords: Arduino Uno, Cables Supported, MATLAB (GUI), Roller based Painting, Wall Painting Robot