Development of a Gondola Type External Wall Painting Robot

The painting of building external walls is usually performed using a gondola or scaffolding, involves working at considerable heights, and is an unclean job due to windblown paint spray. Recently too, there have been problems involving quality due to lack of skilled painters. As a solution to such problems, painting robots have been developed for external painting of large scale structures such as nuclear power stations and ware house buildings. Until now, painting robots have been developed for use with mast type mobile staging. However, in order to provide a more general system and achieve improved work efficiency, a new painting robot was developed that can be suspended from gondola staging. This paper gives a general outline of the newly developed robot and reports the results of field trials that were carried out to verify its effectiveness.