9 Home Builder Awards 2023 BUILD obviously not the time you should stop your career. That was because of RSI. PACO can solve this problem.” With a robot doing all the painting, this means consistent high quality of work, too. PACO uses a very repetitive and optimised gesture throughout a paint job, and comes equipped with an automated airless spraying system, which guarantees complete precision. Additionally, as PACO knows about the applied quantity of paint, it can apply the equivalent thickness of two coats of paint in one go so as to speed up the process. This all comes in very useful for large-scale jobs, with Antoine saying, “It’s not a tool that you would use on any type of site; it is a tool for a specific type of site – the bigger volumes that have a lot of square metres to be painted. That’s where the collaboration between man and machine really comes into play.” Notably, Les Companions also has several partnerships to enhance its offering, including that with its historical investors and high-performance paint companies, AkzoNobel which is best known for its UK brand, Dulux and Unikalo, a major French paint brand. Undoubtedly, PACO will revolutionise an industry that Antoine describes as “in need of change” but with challenges. While robots have been used by companies for years, there are technicalities that have made them a challenge to deploy within construction. Antoine explains, “The car you are driving, if you have a car, has probably been manufactured by robots somehow, and this has been the case for 30 or 40 years now. The construction environment requires more smartness, more complex algorithm. In the industrial environment, you always do the same task, however, in construction, there are no two rooms that are exactly the same, even in a multiple-storey building. All that makes it more difficult to deploy a robot into the construction environment than it is into an industrial environment.” But Les Companions has made it happen. At the end of the day, what PACO does is make life easier. It overcomes all painting struggles and enables an easier day at work. As Antoine says, what Les Companions is selling with PACO is “peace of mind” and “an easier life onsite for everyone”. So, what’s next for Les Companions and PACO? Now having almost finished the R&D stage and taken feedback of professional painters into account, the company is gearing up to release PACO into the market this year. Antoine tells us, “At the moment, we are looking for the first early-stage customers – people who want to change the industry with us, people who feel the daily problems that come with being a painter. These will be our first customers, and building a safe, sound, fruitful relationship with them is our challenge for this year.” Company: Les Companions Contact: Antoine Rennuit Email: [email protected] Website: www.lescompanions.com
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUyMDQwMA==