Spray Painting with Marion Pinaffo and Raphaël Pluvinage

Spray Painting is one of the six experiments of A Third Hand – Creative Applications for Robotics, a research project conducted at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland by AATB (Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet), Alain Bellet and Martin Hertig, developed in collaboration with the designers Marion Pinaffo and Raphaël Pluvinage.

Together they built a spray-painting tool for a UR10 robotic arm: a 3D-printed actuator with a stepper motor, driven by an Arduino through the robot’s IO, that presses an ordinary spray can. Manual tests of 15 colours, 10 spray caps, distances and speeds came first, about 70 samples; then the arm took over, programmed point by point and with a custom UR SVG Planner, to paint graphics onto three-dimensional wooden objects.