Co-innovating tomorrow… not without reason Yokogawa’s slogan. And of course, the robot dog SPOT must be part of that! According to developer Boston Dynamics , Spot will play a revolutionary role in our industry. You have probably seen a video of this impressive robot before.
It is a nimble robot that walks on uneven terrain and climbs stairs with mechanical legs. Spot detects and inspects, collects data and can explore without limits. The result? Safely and efficiently performing tasks in an industrial environment. And you should especially think of oil & gas facilities and electrified or radiation-rich areas.
Yokogawa in the Netherlands is the ‘foster father’ of a SPOT. They use SPOT to validate whether tasks can be replaced in a high-risk environment of an operator at one of their customers. Currently they have about 9000 inspection points per shift. This is seen as very time consuming since there are 3 shifts per day. It also appears that the chance of errors increases when an operator does repetitive work. You can imagine missing a few spots when you need to inspect 9000 points by the eye.
SPOT can make very precise photos of the equipment and uploads the pictures to an AI (artificial intelligence) application in the cloud. Here, the application verifies if there is an anomaly. If so, the operator be notified accordingly so he/she can interfere or inspect manually if needed.
Did you know that SPOT is partly Japanese?
American robotics company Boston Dynamics was first owned by Google, then acquired by Japan’s Softbank and now in hands of Hyundai and for 20% by Softbank. Last year they started selling the advanced robot dog. The 110cm long robot weighs over 30 kilos. With its 605Wh battery, it can walk for an hour and a half.
