People balk at the idea of robots snatching our creative jobs, but our dangerous jobs? Have at ‘em, robots.
The Hustle previously covered Grain Weevil, a robot developed by a Nebraska father-and-son team to break up clumps and level grain in silos. People often do this job by climbing into silos and walking across the grain, but it’s precarious as unstable grain can act like quicksand.
Now, Cleveland startup RoadPrintz offers another useful bot that can paint symbols — turn arrows, “Bus Only,” bike lane markings — onto roads, eliminating the need for stencils or humans to be standing in roadways.
How it works
A robotic arm — RoadPrintz’s first prototype is named Stella — comes mounted on a Ford F-550 Super Duty extended cab truck.
Instead of stenciling symbols on the pavement themselves, workers remain in the truck, stopping and aligning the truck where the symbol needs to go.
The arm — programmed with ~80 symbols and numbers — then paints the selected symbol while one operator watches from the comfort of their temperature-controlled cab on a video monitor. It can also place cones down before or after the painting while it dries, which takes ~10 minutes. Here’s a video demonstration.
The bot reduces what’s ordinarily a three-person crew down to one and doesn’t require anyone to stand in the road, which can be dangerous and difficult.
Where it’s working
It took RoadPrintz seven years to develop its bot, but it recently made a deal to sell one to the Missouri Department of Transportation.
RoadPrintz co-founder Wyatt Newman told Cleveland.com he estimated the department will recoup $500k in labor and productivity savings in two years.
Municipalities that use RoadPrintz may also find that using RoadPrintz work and symbol library prevents errors, like the multiple times crews have misspelled “school.”