Line Marking Robot: From Hand Brushes to ABB Paint Arms

Every football season someone has to put the lines back on the grass, and every spring road crews repaint the arrows and crosswalks that winter wore away. A line marking robot does that job from a stored map, steering itself by satellite and spraying paint where the plan says. This post traces line marking from a leaky milk wagon in 1911 Michigan, through striping trucks and walk-behind machines, to the GPS robots schools are using this autumn and a robot arm that paints crosswalks from a truck. It ends with where ABB's paint robots and mobile robots could fit. For now that fit is a possibility, since ABB does not sell a line marker.

A road crew repaints arrows and lane lines in Aberdeen beside a line painting truck, 2024. Photo: Colin Smith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How roads and pitches got their painted lines

The painted road line began with a milk wagon. Edward N. Hines of Wayne County, Michigan, saw a leaky milk wagon leave a white trail along a road, and in 1911 the first documented painted centre line went down on River Road in Trenton. Other places got there on their own in 1917. In California, June McCarroll had been run off the road and hand-painted a white stripe down its middle. In Oregon, a yellow centre line was painted that April on the Columbia River Highway between Crown Point and Multnomah Falls, under Peter Rexford's direction. Britain had its first white lines on dangerous bends near Ashford, Kent, in 1914.

The Columbia River Highway seen from Crown Point, Oregon, on a postcard from around 1916. Photo: Cross & Dimmitt, via Rob Ketcherside / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Paint became the everyday road marking material from about the early 1950s, and the striping truck came with it. Crews drove slowly along the road while spray guns mounted on the truck laid down the line. Thermoplastic, which is melted and laid hot, and epoxy, in use since the late 1970s, later gave markings a longer life. The method itself barely changed for decades. A person steered a vehicle along the old line or a set-out mark, and separate crews on foot used stencils for arrows, words and crosswalks, standing in the road while traffic went past.

A striping truck painting the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, 1973. Photo: R. G. Bruce, National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sports fields were marked much the same way, on foot. A groundskeeper measured the pitch, stretched string between stakes and pushed a wheeled marker along it, then repeated the job whenever rain or mowing wore the lines away. At Brady Public Schools in Nebraska, measuring and pulling layout string used to take the crew three to four days before a game, and wind blew paint off target from the hand sprayers. At Otsego Local Schools in Ohio, the grounds crew says four people used to spend six to eight hours lining one football field by hand. Ride-on stripers took the walking out of car park work, but someone still had to steer them.

A worker trains on a ride-on paint striping machine at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, 2016. Photo: NAVFAC via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

GPS robots on school fields in 2026

On 1 October 2026 KNOP News in North Platte reported that Brady Public Schools lines its fields with an autonomous, GPS-guided Turf Tank robot that uses satellite mapping to paint with millimetre-level precision. Maintenance director Ryan Sanger said prep time fell from three or four days to about a day and a half, and paint use from six jugs per field to four. The district also lends the robot to a neighbouring district. On 5 October the Illinois station WAND TV aired its own story about a robot painting a high school football field. In August, Otsego said one operator with a leased Turf Tank 2 could line a field in roughly four hours.

A groundsman pushes a wheeled marker to paint the white lines on the pitch at Torquay Academy. Photo: Derek Harper / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The same robots handle more than football. Otsego's grounds chief has used the Turf Tank 2 on baseball diamonds, soccer pitches and parking lots, and Turf Tank robots have marked fields for NFL games, Major League Soccer and the MLB All-Star Game. TinyMobileRobots, a Danish maker, is the exclusive robotic line painting partner of the NFHS, the body that writes the rules for US high school sports. Roads are starting to follow. RoadPrintz of Cleveland has mounted an industrial robot arm on a Ford F-550 that paints turn arrows, crosswalks and bike symbols while the operator stays in the cab, and the company quotes a line width tolerance of ±2 mm.

Visitors look at the controls inside an Oregon DOT striping truck during a 2013 tour. Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB does not make a line marking robot, and as far as public sources show none of these machines use its arms. Its paint robots work on a related problem indoors. The IRB 5500 is built for the explosive air of a paint booth, and in 2022 ABB fitted IRB 5500 robots with a PixelPaint head of 1,000 nozzles to copy artwork onto a Volkswagen SUV in under 30 minutes, with the paint path coordinated in RobotStudio. RoadPrintz's truck shows that a six-axis arm on a vehicle can take over stencil work, and an ABB arm of similar reach could in principle do the same. Our post on paint robots from car booths to home walls covers ABB's painting side.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot with PixelPaint over Illusorr's finished design on the art car, 2022. Photo: ABB

Where line marking robots head next

On sports fields the next step is mostly about price and reach. Brady already shares one robot between districts, and Lakeland PBS reported in September that Cass Lake-Bena schools in Minnesota were considering buying one. A robot that stores a field layout can repaint it after each mowing, and switching from football to soccer markings becomes a software change. On roads the harder problem is traffic. Crosswalks, arrows and stop bars are usually painted by crews standing in live lanes, so a robot that keeps the worker in the cab deals with the most dangerous part of the job first.

Crews paint new crosswalk lines on a New York street during restoration work, 2018. Photo: MTA Capital Construction / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Factories and warehouses have lines too. Aisles, walkways and parking spots for mobile robots are marked on the floor, and the markings change whenever a production line is rebuilt. That is closer to ABB's home ground. Its Flexley Mover AMRs already find their way around plants with 3D Visual SLAM, and putting a spray or tape tool on a mobile base is one possible way for the same mapping to mark a floor, though ABB does not offer such a tool today. Building sites already use small robots that print layout lines on concrete slabs, as our post on the construction layout robot describes.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

The open problems look similar on a road or a pitch. GPS needs a clear view of the sky, so tall stands, buildings and tree cover can cause trouble, and a robot still needs a person to set it up, refill the paint and watch for people walking into its path. Cost matters for small schools and councils: Otsego leased its robot, and Brady shares its own. Road authorities will want proof that robot markings meet their rules for width and reflectivity before they replace crews. For the workers, the job moves toward planning layouts on a tablet and looking after the machine, with less time spent bent over a stencil in traffic.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, a design built to work in explosive paint booth air. Photo: ABB

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