I saw a few attempts at painting on a wall with drones :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjRPooS2XB0 Not precise enough, but seems effective to quickly repaint a wall if you want recover an offensive graffiti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtTArMMP2xA Talking about offensive graffiti... ;-) This is close to what I had in mind, I think you need to "touch" the wall to have a good precision, but this drone still flies, my approach won't involve flying (and might not be called a drone)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5K_KBoa74 This one touches the wall but stay quite far, it seems difficult to do precision work without very good skills.
So I though about another approach : could we just use the propeller to stick to the wall, and wheels to climb the wall?
I can think of 3 different design to accomplish this
- Design 1
This would look like a RC car with a propeller
- Design 2
the idea is basically to to work like an inkjet printer, but instead of using
stepper motors to scroll the paper, those would be used to climb the wall.
And a pair of propellers would allow this "air printer" to stick to the wall
- Design 3
This design would be like a CNC router mounted on propellers.
Not different from design 2, except the printed head would move in 2 directions.
Also, I don't know much about drones, so don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong. I think the physics are correct, and that it would need less power to stick to the wall than to fly, but if you have an idea of how to calculate that, leave a comment!
Why? What would this project solve?
It would allow people either to make some street art graffiti in hard to reach place, or it could allow to clean unwanted graffiti and vandalism.
I like the idea of using a propeller to stick to the wall instead of flying, as it is not what it was intended for!
You need a force pressing to the wall which is at least 1/coefficient of friction times the weight. As the coefficient of friction is typically smaller than 1 you need a larger force than the weight. So you probably want to point the propeller downward to generation a significant amount of lift directly.