Autonomous Roofing Drone Uses a Nail Gun to Shingle

A team of roboticists and aerospace engineering researchers from the University of Michigan  introduce the first experimental demonstration of an autonomous roofing system using an multicopter. They showed that it can successfully apply a shingle onto a roof. A DJI S1000 octocopter was equipped with an off-the-shelf nail gun, and the nail gun was modified to allow triggering from the vehicle and tooltip compression feedback. The researchers used a modified version of open-source autopilot software called ArduPilot to help the drone navigate to waypoints and apply appropriate pressure to operate the nail gun.