RoadPrintz Debuts Its Robotic Arm to Paint Crosswalks in Public Square

Cleveland is the city of many firsts: The first city to use electric streetlights. The first city to use electric traffic signals. And now, the first city to use a robot to paint crosswalks.

That's thanks to RoadPrintz, a Cleveland-based small-business startup, which designed a robotic painting system called Electra.

The system uses a Yaskawa robot arm mounted on the trunk of a Ford-F550, along with camera views, graycoat painting equipment and custom-built sensors and software. With a double-acting spray head, the system allows for easy operation and includes the use of electronic stencils. The system handles various tasks such as painting arrows, lanes, lettering and special symbols, says Wyatt Newman, the co-founder and chief of technology of RoadPrintz.

“We put the whole system together, [we] tried to make it easy to use,” he told Scene.

Newman – who is also a professor of electrical, computer and systems engineering at the Case Western School of Engineering – and his co-founder Sam Bell, the President of RoadPrintz, had a goal to reimagine the often dangerous, labor-intensive process of road painting. Instead of city workers being put in danger while working on street curbs with stencils, RoadPrintz operates with a vehicle driven by a City of Cleveland painter who controls the robot's arm movements using a touch screen and views from the camera that is built on the robot arm.

“The painters [are] inside a cab surrounded by steel instead of standing on the pavement getting hit,” Newman says.

It's not replacing jobs, Newman says, it's making the existing ones safer and saving cities money.

“The more that we can do well-designed [street painting], the safer all of the street users will be,” Newman says. “So if we can make it cheaper, easier [and] safer to put that down, then we can make it generally safer for the public.”


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