PAINT-R: Mobile Sustainment Tool to Enable Painting and De-Painting in Remote Locations

Letterkenny Army Depot (LEAD) and the broader Army sustainment community have limited means to conduct painting, de-painting, and corrosion prevention/removal activities safely and efficiently in deployed resource-scarce locations. LEAD artisans and Soldiers rely on manual tools that consume time and manpower, and expose personnel to toxic fumes and chemicals when working on critical air defense platforms. The alternative is returning these platforms to distant higher level maintenance echelons. This is impractical in a contested logistics environment, where logistics resupply lines will come under enemy attack and disruption. Artisans and Soldiers need capabilities to perform painting and de-painting activities in deployed locations so that air defense assets platforms can perform in combat effectively.áTo address this challenge, aRoboticsCompany proposes a handheld variant of its robotic painting and de-painting solution, PAINT-R.á The PAINT-R system consists of a handheld laser cleaning tool and air sprayer wrapped in a vacuum cowl that sucks in and contains ablated paint. This system requires no solid or liquid consumables. Using either laser ablation or orbital sanding attachments in the PAINT-R cleaning head, operators can reduce painted surfaces to bright, bare metal surfaces free of dust, paint particulate, and blast media. The vacuum cowling moves large air flow rates at a moderate negative pressure around the tool head. The cowling body is shaped to physically obstruct the spread of airborne paint and fine particulate and captures the dust into a wide-cross section airstream flowing into the cowling. This reduces contamination, allowing de-painted surfaces to be immediately repainted with minimal touch-up. PAINT-R saves soldiers time by depainting and repainting assets in the same workspace, without having to move the asset to a new clean area or meticulously clean the asset before repainting.