Centa Painter is a made-in-India robot for putty, sanding, primer and painting. It helps projects finish faster, with consistent quality and fewer workers and at lower cost. It is working on live sites with orders from India's leading developers, contractors and paint brands.
Srinivas K Pai, Co-Founder & CEO, Pace Robotics
As residential, commercial and institutional projects are being delivered at an unprecedented scale and pace, building finishes have become a critical bottleneck that disrupts schedules and delays handover. The finishing work remains largely manual, and the shortage of skilled finishing labour shows up directly as rework, time and cost overruns, and uneven quality across projects.
At Pace Robotics, we have developed a proprietary Physical AI platform purpose-built for building finishes. Centa Painter is our first robot to be built on this platform. It performs putty application, sanding, priming and painting on walls and ceilings. On site, it works up to 10 times the speed of manual methods, with up to 80% less manpower and up to 3 times lower cost, while maintaining a superior and consistent quality of finish. The robot works fully autonomously and requires human guidance only for room-to-room movement and material mixing.
Built in India, Built for the World
Centa Painter has been conceptualised, designed and developed entirely in India following close to five years of R&D, site trials and pilots. It is the first and only multi-tasking robot for building finishes to be developed and commercialised in the country. At its core is NetriX, our proprietary Physical AI architecture, the brain that drives our robots.
NetriX allows the robot to understand its surroundings, plan its work and make its own decisions without any human input. Every layer of the platform, from hardware to software, has been engineered in-house around the realities of construction sites. The robot has been tested and perfected through thousands of square feet of real site work before launching commercially.
Built for Construction Sites
Every construction site is different. Surface qualities vary, sequences change, and no two projects ever look alike. Centa Painter is built to work in exactly these conditions. It works autonomously without any drawings, dimensions or pre-scanning. The operator places it in a room and chooses the task. Within a few seconds, the robot positions itself and starts working while the operator stands and observes every wall and ceiling surface getting completed. A safety zone pauses work when a person comes close.An integrated pump sprays the material on the surface uniformly, and a vacuum extracts dust at source during sanding. Every job is tracked in real time, and location, area covered and productivity per day and per hour are recorded automatically.
Operated by Painters, Not Technicians
Centa Painter is operated by painters, not robotics engineers or technicians. One operator supervises the robot as it works autonomously, and a helper mixes and feeds material. A painter or any construction worker can be trained to operate it in a few days.
Live on Construction Sites
Centa Painter has been working on live sites for almost a year, since commercial deployment began, and is close to completing an 18-storey residential tower.Within a few months, India's leading real estate developers, contractors and paint brands have placed orders worth close to Rs.7 crore, including repeat purchases, and more customers are now lining up for deployment.
More than 30 real estate developers and construction companies have evaluated the robot through live demonstrations and several more have shown interest in demonstrations, which will be scheduled in the coming months.
We are now scaling manufacturing to meet this demand and to projects across India and to international markets. For a long time, the question was whether robots could work in construction. Today, it is how to deploy them at scale.
