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Disney Invents Spray Painting Drone

Disney Research, the arm of the Walt Disney Company which works on developing high-tech "building blocks" for the rest of Disney, has invented an autonomous, spray-painting drone called the PaintCopter, the company described in a paper this week. The PaintCopter--described in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters on October 2nd--is an quadcopter aimed at use in industrial painting applications, which ties a spray gun with a pan-tilt mechanism, in order to print on 3D structures and textures. Disney showed off a prototype of the drone system painting a textured, fake rock surface reminiscent of the outside of its famous Matterhorn Bobsled ride. Disney said its system for autonomous spray painting using a UAV, suitable for industrial applications is diffrent from typical spray painting of a single color, because of its ability to texture and handle 3D surfaces.