Boston Dynamics‘ Spot robot will soon join the autonomous inspection drone developed by the Israeli company Percepto. To this end, the company has raised a strategic investment of $45 million in Series B funding and partnered with a robotics company Boston Dynamics. The Series B funding, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), brings the company’s total investment to $72.5 million.
To advance the Autonomous Inspection & Monitoring (AIM) platform, Percepto plans to use its autonomous Sparrow Drone with the third-party robot for industrial inspection applications. The company selected Boston Dynamics’ Spot as the first ground-based robot to be integrated with AIM alongside Percepto’s Sparrow Drone.
Spot is the first robot from Boston Dynamics to become available for commercial purposes after years of development. The four-legged robot can independently navigate difficult terrain with unprecedented mobility. The robot dog is equipped with a laser scanner and a 360º camera to view the surroundings and map out a route.
Percepto has integrated Spot with AIM to automate inspection rounds completely controlled remotely via the platform. Spot carries Percepto’s payloads for high-resolution imaging and thermal vision to detect issues including hot spots on machines or electrical conductors, water and steam leaks around plants and equipment with degraded performance, with the data relayed via AIM.
Operating a fleet of third-party robots alongside their drone-in-a-box solution, Percepto AIM provides visual data management and analysis to report trends and anomalies and alert risks. Any staff member can request data, and Percepto AIM will deploy the most suitable robot independently without human accompaniment to retrieve and stream the required data. The platform also seamlessly reports to assess risk, minimize downtime, drive efficiency, and reduce operational costs without human intervention.
ICL Dead Sea, a mineral and chemicals company, has been operating Percepto’s drone-in-a-box solution to carry out industrial inspection, safety, and security missions at its operations at the Dead Sea site and were the first to fly beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) in Israel. “With Percepto’s AIM, we can now live stream all of our missions and no longer have to be physically present on-site to control decisions regarding maintenance and operations. Wherever we are, we know exactly what is happening on-site,” said Shay Hen, ICL Dead Sea Drone Program Manager. “We are looking forward to examining the integration of additional robots such as Boston Dynamics’ Spot onto our site for holistic inspection capabilities beyond aerial inspection.“
