Nestlé Purina’s Robo-Dog Maintenance Techs
By Dennis Scimeca for Industry Week
Just as a real dog can fetch the newspaper, shake hands and climb stairs, robotic Rovers have been taught to do the same tricks. What if those robo-dogs could also be trained to amble down aisles of machinery and climb stairs to take predictive maintenance readings on less-than-critical machinery?
Boston Dynamics has created four-legged maintenance technicians, appropriately called Spot. Just as appropriately, Nestle Purina is putting them to work tracking acoustic abnormalities and heat buildup, because the company did not consider it cost-effective to expand IoT coverage to non-critical assets.
“Predictive maintenance technicians have better things to do than walk up and down countless stairwells across a plant to point acoustic sensors and thermal cameras at equipment for hours at a time,” begins a story in our sister brand Industry Week. “If only a robot excelled at climbing up and down stairs.”
The official pilot took place in a high-performing plant that used automated guided vehicles, whose technicians were comfortable working around an autonomous robot. Nestlé Purina’s Clinton, Iowa, plant, which often serves as a testbed for new digital solutions and technology deployments, hosted Spot’s proof-of-concept test.