AI Painting Startup
PACO the painting robot uses AI to help painters sand and paint.
AI Robotics startup Les Companions is a French startup who have collaborated with AkzoNobel, a chemical company, to develop a robot to sand and paint walls for new builds and renovations.
PACO, an abbreviation of Painter Companion, is designed to work along side a human painter. The AI robot creates a 3D image of the space to be painted by scanning the room, differentiating the walls which need to be painted from areas such as windows and doors which don't. The human painter then programs PACO and they work together to compete the room. PACO sands or spray paints the walls using the 3D map it has created, leaving the human painter to work on the finer areas such as door and window frames.
With a big shortage of painters and decorators in the UK at the moment, the creation of an AI driven painting robot is very timely. Using PACO to complete the more tedious and low skilled tasks, frees up time for the human painter to focus on the higher skilled jobs which PACO cannot complete yet.
The need for PACO was highlighted 3 years ago when AkzoNobel ran its innovation competition " Paint The Future" and asked the question " How to apply paint in a smarter way?". Les Companions came up with the concept for PACO and started working with AkzoNobel to make it a reality.
Click here to view a YouTube video of PACO in action.
