PAINTbot - FPGA based wall painting service robot prototype

A fully functional wall painting robot prototype for indoor and outdoor environments has been developed. The prototype development includes building the hardware and software subsystems for the robot. The robot controller has developed using the Altera DE2 Development Board with the software implementation done in Quartus II 8.1 and NIOS II IDE using C language programming. Hardware development of the robot involves building the main chassis, the stepper motor and drivers, sensor circuitries and electro pneumatic controls of the air brush for painting. The software implementation includes converting the MATLAB code to C and VHDL codes to generate the coordinates when the area of the workspace is provided. These coordinates are used to specify the changes in length for the supporting string. The robot movements from point to point are done based on changing the respective suspension lengths to reach a particular coordinate. A path planning algorithm was developed and validated in MATLAB with two path options, z-path and u-path. The paint area was also plotted on the workspace in the GUI. In the functional prototype, the robot is able to paint a workspace specified by user, avoiding all windows area. However, the quality of painting needs to be greatly improved before deployments are possible.