Every time Boston Dynamics puts out one of their big YouTube productions,
the world is amazed. The robots dance. Or they do parkour.
All of which is very impressive, but it's under controlled conditions in a lab.
It's not exactly a practical, real-world use.
So what are those robots actually being used for in the real world?
Inside this mountainside in western Austria is a hydroelectric power plant.
I would have filmed this piece-to-camera actually down in the turbine hall, but...
[shouting over industrial noise] It's a bit loud in here!
At full capacity, 150 tons of water a second goes down from the uphill reservoir,
through the turbines in the cavern, generating 350 megawatts of power.
And it's all run remotely. Switching this plant on and off
is done at a control center about half an hour's drive that way,
where they also control twenty other hydro plants.
On a normal day, no-one works here at all.
But for safety, someone does have to regularly drive out to all those
twenty power plants, and check the physical things are all as they should be.
So you can probably see where this is going.
- We are using a robot to continuously do inspection tasks,
and therefore testing if this is plausible in the middle of the Alps.
Energy Robotics is putting software on robots to make them smart.
We are a software company and we're not building the hardware.
We are writing code.
Therefore, we ask other companies to build the hardware for us,
or use existing robots already.
We work with a lot of robot companies. We're picking the best robot for the task.
- Boston Dynamics and other companies build the actual physical robots, and provide
a remote controller that someone can use to directly move the bots around.
But they also provide an interface for computer code.
The robot has built-in navigation and obstacle avoidance,
so in the same way that you can write code to automate things
on a regular computer, you can write code for the robot dog's computer too.
Your code can learn the whole site that you're working at
and tell the bot, OK, find your way to this point.
Look at this thing. Take a picture or a temperature reading.
And if that picture doesn't look like it should,
or there's something blocking your way, let us know about it.
The robot is not remote controlled. It's doing that task autonomously.
That means we teach it a certain mission.
And the robot does the repetition of the mission.
But it'll also be, in the future, able to do something called "click and inspect".
That means we have a digital twin of the environment,
and then we're just saying what the robot needs to inspect.
And the robot plans a path towards the inspection point and gets the information.
The robot autonomously extracts that information and reacts
based on the results, which means either it sends an alarm
if it's out of the norm, or it just collects information, then
puts it into the report at the end of the mission.
You can send robot dogs into toxic or radioactive environments
humans shouldn't be in.
But this isn't a particularly dangerous site. They let me in, after all.
It's just inconvenient to drive here,
particularly in winter, when snowstorms might close the mountain road entirely.
This is a place designed for humans, though,
which is why robots with wheels or tracks aren't an option.
- So it's important to have a robot which is capable to operate in human environment,
because all the infrastructure humans have built has been built for humans.
So therefore, we need the robot to be capable of interacting
with its environment, meaning simply: every other situation
like here where we need to climb stairs, we're using a robot on legs.
In the substation,
where we have flat ground, for example, we're using robots on wheels or on tracks.
We're developing a skill which we'll use in oil and gas,
where many of our robots are actually working,
which we call "Man Down Detector", so that if the robot detects someone lying
on the ground, because of whatever incident, then the robot sounds an alarm,
and therefore brings the troops to help the person lying on the ground.
- This trial will succeed or fail based on two questions.
First, does it work reliably?
And second, if so, is it cheaper overall than sending out people,
people, particularly when there might be a shortage of engineers soon?
- The goal is to support human inspection, and in the long run to replace certain parts,
especially those where humans need to be sent in hazardous environments.
In Germany, we have about 8,000 substations.
All of those need to have inspections,
and the number of substations is growing due to the change to renewable energy.
We need to have more robots on the ground, because we have not enough
engineers in the workforce right now, and we need about 400,000
more in the next ten years.
The robot can perform up to twelve hours of inspections: sixty minutes
walking around, sixty minutes charging, so a lot of inspection every day.
Over the next few years,
we're also testing assisted manipulation, where the robot is with a human
doing manipulation tasks within infrastructure environments.
In the future that might be fully autonomous manipulation,
but there's probably some years to go.
- If this works and if it gets rolled out, then the power companies
will be saving employee time and therefore money.
In the same way that twenty power plants can now be controlled from one center,
twenty power plants could be inspected from one center,
with actual human engineers
dispatched only when there's actually something wrong that needs to be fixed.
And I suspect it will be a while
before the robots start to take over that job as well.