Robotics in Industrial Maintenance

Industrial robotics are a key element of Industry 4.0. (Learn more about the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the fourth industrial revolution with our guide.) As part of these rapid changes, the field of robotics is advancing at the same pace. That’s also the case when it comes to robots for industrial maintenance. 

These maintenance robots do everything from cleaning to detecting leaks. Benefits of using robots include not just the ability to do tasks that may be hazardous for humans, but also to achieve optimal accuracy and work consistently over long periods of time. Maintenance robots can reach the places it’s difficult, arduous or dangerous for people to reach, including high voltage overhead lines and wind turbines. Robots can also readily be reprogrammed to do new types of activity.

Remote inspections are a key area where industrial robots are used for maintenance. Remote inspections can be used for large internal tank inspections, for example, which are often difficult and time-consuming to carry out with personnel. 

Robots are, of course, already widely used in manufacturing for production purposes but their flexibility, safety, accuracy, and versatility will see them adopted in ever-increasing numbers for industrial maintenance. 

Read on to find out more about how and why.

So where are robots being used for maintenance? Industrial robotics have been used in oil and gas for several years for inspections. Shell’s Sensabot robot, launched in 2016, for example, is used for surveillance of oil and gas facilities. Sensabot can also be used in other remote or harsh environments. Shell is using ‘sniffer’ robots to target emissions of methane at its facilities and stop the greenhouse gas escaping into the atmosphere. 

Also in oil and gas, Waygate Technologies, part of energy technology company Baker Hughes, offers crawler robots capable of carrying non-destructive testing payloads and inspecting confined spaces, while ExRobotics of the Netherlands produces the ExR-1, a robot designed for inspecting equipment and facilities in chemical processing plants and for oil and gas production. 

In the aerospace sector, aero engine giant Rolls-Royce is developing robots for industrial maintenance, including ‘snake’ robots that work their way through a jet engine in the manner of an endoscope. Rolls-Royce is also developing swarms of tiny ‘cockroach’ robots designed to crawl around inside an engine for maintenance purposes. 

To act as the eyes and ears of a maintenance team, robots use sensors, vision systems, and laser technology to engage with the environment. They are particularly suited to surveillance of hazards, checking the health of infrastructure, and detecting problems in the environment such as radiation, fire, or emissions of gas. 

Robots and automation are expected to be used for maintenance in industry more in the future. Robots’ capabilities in terms of precision, repeatability, ability to work around the clock, safety, and imperviousness to hazardous environments are all attractive to the maintenance engineer. 

Will robots replace workers altogether when it comes to maintenance? It’s more likely that people will work alongside maintenance robots using AI. Despite all the advantages of automation, there are certain activities where the dexterity of people will always be needed. It's thought that collaborative robots – known as ‘co-bots’ – will play an important role.

The dream is for automation to take up a lot of the slack when it comes to maintenance that is difficult, tedious, or hazardous, freeing up engineers to do other tasks. Although robots are sometimes perceived as a threat, it is more likely that robots and people will combine their respective strengths in the years to come.

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