About project
On April 30, 2015, American graffiti artist KATSU was the first in the world to use a hand-operated drone equipped with a spray can to paint a giant advertising poster in new York.
On September 6, 2017, an automatic graffiti drone created by Tsuru robotics drew a real art canvas for the first time in history at the Vinzavod exhibition hall in Moscow.
After learning about the Tsuru Robotics achievement, KATSU got in touch with us — and so the collaboration began. It resulted in a joint project, which received the quite natural name KATSURU – derived from the artist’s pseudonym and the name of our company.
KATSURU is a project with the aim of creating a graffiti drone that is accessible to everyone – a graffiti drone that can be purchased and used for drawings. Currently, the alpha version of the device has been developed. KATSU developed the design and functionality of the drone and Tsuru Robotics engineers developed the technology.
What are the parameters of the new device? The duration of continuous drawing is 10 minutes. During this time, the drone uses one standard 400-milliliter can of paint. The weight of the device is about a kilogram.
The first version of the katsuru drone works in manual mode. The drone flies up to the wall, determines the distance to it, and clings at a distance of 30 cm. Further movement occurs in a plane parallel to the wall: up-down, left-right. When you press the paint release button, a line appears on the wall. The distance of the graffiti drone from the artist is almost unlimited.
Now the first stage of the project’s release has been completed — a number of pre-orders have been collected. Deliveries are expected in late 2020. We look forward to receiving feedback from our first customers to continue working on improvements. The trailblazers will become a kind of focus group that will help us in our future work.
This project is exciting for us, first of all, not as a commercial one. For Katsu, the graffiti drone is the device of his dreams, with which he wants to go down in art history. For Tsuru Robotics, this is an opportunity to be the first in the world to create a new publicly available technology – in fact, another “brush” for artists.
