It's Friday, so why not watch some good old-fashioned drone-powered graffiti? A design firm in Italy has put together a lovely little show that collected sketches from the art community and put them all together in a giant mural, painted over 12 hours by a team of drones.

This is the abstract of the paper published on this painting UAV.

This paper describes a system for autonomous spray painting using a UAV, suitable for industrial applications. The work is motivated by the potential for such a system to achieve accurate and fast painting results. The PaintCopter is a quadrotor that has been custom fitted with an arm plus a spray gun on a pan-tilt mechanism. To enable long deployment times for industrial painting tasks, power and paint are delivered by lines from an external unit. The ability to paint planar surfaces such as walls in single color is a basic requirement for a spray painting system. But this work addresses more sophisticated operation that subsumes the basic task, including painting on 3D structure, and painting of a desired texture appearance. System operation consists of (a) an offline component to capture a 3D model of the target surface, (b) an offline component to design the painted surface appearance, and generate the associated robotic painting commands, (c) a live system that carries out the spray painting. Experimental results demonstrate autonomous spray painting by the UAV, doing area fill and versatile line painting on a 3D surface.

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Negli ultimi 10 anni c'e' stato uno sviluppo esponenziale della tecnologia di accumulo chimico dell'energia, si e' passati dalle comuni Nichel-Cadmio alle Nichel-MetalHidride, poi alle Litio Ioni, e l'ultimo eccezionale salto di qualità si e' avuto con le batterie Litio-Polimeri, che sono leggere e potentissime, oltreche' avere ulteriori vantaggi tutt'altro che secondari, tutto cio', insieme al progresso della miniaturizzazione dei componenti elettronici ed alla conseguente riduzione di costi, ha permesso lo sviluppo dei microelicotteri elettrici, che da giocattolini sono diventati macchine evolutissime (e costosissime in alcuni casi) con prestazioni paragonabili agli elicotteri a scoppio, con il vantaggio di poterli usare in qualunque luogo, anche al chiuso, "indoor". Tali elicotteri hanno un prezzo base abbastanza modesto, ma con upgrades, motori speciali, batterie Li-Io ecc. vedono lievitare notevolmente i costi.
Ecco una carrellata di alcuni dei piu' noti elicotteri elettrici che offre il mercato.