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STReet Art Drone
Mission of the project
Mission of the project
STRAD aims at perfectly achieving, in a timely manner, a work signed by a renowned street artist on a high-rise building. Drones have been used for artistic purposes for less than a decade. Spray-painting with a classical quadcopter drone has a tolerance of 5 cm and 5 deg with respect to the planned sketch. Its speed is notably limited by the non-holonomic nature of the quadcopter holding the spray nozzle. In this project we plan to modify a fully actuated aerial manipulator developed recently at ICube Strasbourg, called dextAIR [www.dextair.com], so that it can carry a paiting tool.
Visual servoing and advanced data fusion will be used to accurately regulate the robot position with respect to the scene with a sub-centimeter accuracy.
Funding
Funding
Funding application has been submitted on Dec. 2020 to the ANR. The 440k€ funding approval has been notified in Jul. 2021. The project started in Jan. 2022.
Structure of the Project
Structure of the Project
Work package 1
Work package 1
Perception and Sensor Fusion
Work package 2
Work package 2
Path Planning and Control
Work package 3
Work package 3
Design and Fabrication
Work package 4
Work package 4
Experiments and Artistic Event
Achievements
Achievements
On July 24, 2025, the STRAD robot autonomously painted the final dot of a 35,000-dot pointillist street art piece by the artist Kan (https://kandmv.com). The system, composed of a fully actuated aerial platform with eight thrusters and a total station for localization, is entirely controlled via Simulink Coder and the RPIt toolbox that we developed. This mural is a world first, the result of a four-year collaboration between the University of Strasbourg, Université Grenoble Alpes, Polyvionics, and Spacejunk.
Publications
Publications
Team
Team
The STRAD project is coordinated by Jacques Gangloff, Professor at the University of Strasbourg since 2005. He is currently working on cable-driven parallel robotics and aerial robotics. He published around 130 papers, three patents and one book and served on several international editorial boards (e.g. ICRA, IROS). He obtained three best paper awards at international conferences (ICRA, MICCAI and BioRob) and obtained the best paper award of the IEEE transactions on robotics journal.
The STRAD project is be carried out by a strong and complementary consortium of renowned world experts in the area of aerial robotics, control, computer vision and visual servoing. ICube and GIPSA-lab share a common background on control theory applied to innovative mechatronic systems in general and aerial manipulators in particular. They also share similar experimental tools like dedicated Simulink toolboxes for accelerating rapid prototyping of experimental setups [https://github.com/jacqu/rpit]. ICube is more specialized in fast visual servoing while GIPSA-lab has a longer history in aerial systems. Polyvionics will bring its scientific, technical and industrial experience to the consortium and has a strong interest in pushing the technology developed in STRAD to the market. Spacejunk is a key partner in this project bringing all the connections with the artistic world and especially with internationally renowned artists.
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