Energy Drone & Robotics Brief | Sept 20, 2024

Robots: The Future of Construction

The construction site of the future includes robots working alongside people—not replacing them, but making their jobs easier, safer, and more efficient. No need to grab your hard hat, but get ready for some exciting changes!

In this week’s article, “The Growing Role of Robots in the Construction Industry,” we explore how robotics are enhancing the construction field, tackling tough jobs, and ensuring projects run smoother than ever before.

Here’s a peek at what these cutting-edge bots are doing:

Brick by Brick, with a Boost

Thanks to companies like Canvas, robots are automating repetitive tasks like bricklaying and drywall finishing, allowing skilled workers to focus on more complex and creative challenges. (And yes, the robots are happy to handle the heavy lifting!)

Safety First, Thanks to Our Robot Friends

Raise Robotics is helping keep workers out of harm’s way by handling hazardous jobs like slab-edge tasks and Kewazo’s LIFTBOT is doing the heavy lifting on scaffolding builds. They’ve never asked for a coffee break, but they’re definitely making sites safer for humans.

Precision That’s No Joke

While we might struggle with the perfect picture frame alignment, construction robots are all about precision. When Nextera robots are marketing job sites, they’ve got accuracy covered, leaving workers to focus on the finer details.

Robots, AI, and IoT—The Dream Team

With robots integrated into AI and IoT systems, construction sites are becoming more connected and smarter than ever. These bots aren’t just about brawn—they bring brains to the job site, too!

Read more about how robots are being used in construction projects right now

From Subsea to Skies: Equinor’s Robots Are On the Job

Ever wondered what happens when you unleash robots and drones in one of the world’s largest energy companies??

Equinor is using these tech wonders to boost safety, reduce costs, and make sure humans don’t have to do things like crawl into confined spaces or inspect flare stacks from dizzying heights. Because who needs more heights-induced anxiety, right?

In this week's article, “How Equinor Uses Drones and Robotics” we recap a HOIS webinar where Equinor’s Geir Tore Knudsen lets us in on the innovative use of bots and drones across the entire value chain. Here’s the tl;dr version of what we learned:

• Safety First: Robots handle the dangerous jobs so humans don’t have to. Flare stacks? Confined spaces? No thanks!?
• Cost Efficiency: No more expensive, time-consuming scaffolding. Robots can get the job done faster, safer, and often without shutting down operations.
• Cool Tech: From deep-diving subsea robots to drones making deliveries, this is basically the future we’ve seen in sci-fi movies—minus the humanoids with feelings.?

Read on to learn about Equinor’s robots...and maybe avoid getting “volunteered” for that next height-based inspection.

Read the full webinar summary and access the recording

WHAT ELSE?

• A robot, dubbed Telesco by operators Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), began entering the Unit 2 reactor at the defunct Fukushima nuclear power plant, in an attempt to test the retrieval of a tiny piece of the fuel that melted down in 2011.
• Greensea IQ?has launched a newly enhanced underwater hull?inspection robot for EverClean IQ. It combines the hull crawling robot and underwater flight capabilities of its EverClean hull cleaning robot with multiple integrated ultrasonic metal thickness sensors and cameras to create a powerful new underwater inspection tool
• The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office is getting ready to launch a new program using drones to respond to 911 calls in The Woodlands, TX. The drones would go up immediately on those calls, go to the scene and be able to start looking for the suspects, record evidence and relay that information to first responders arriving on scene.
• Rotor Technologies, Inc., announced a new unmanned aerial vehicle?for the 2025 model year: Airtruck, a utility UAV with 1,000+ lbs of payload capacity. Introductory pricing is less than $1,000,000.
• British energy giant bp has entered into a new five-year strategic agreement with Palantir Technologies to incorporate advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities through Palantir’s AIP software, says?GlobalData.
• Exyn Technologies announced their partnership with Stitch3D, a provider of modern cloud solutions to host, manage, view, process, and share point cloud data securely directly on the web.?

ABOUT US

The Energy Drone & Robotics Coalition is focused on innovating energy operations with dynamic UAV, Robotics, Data and Automation solutions.

The Energy Drone & Robotics Coalition (aka EDR Coalition or EDRC) is a forum dedicated to launching, growing and scaling enterprise unmanned systems operations in energy companies worldwide by bringing the leaders in the drone and robotics ecosystem together with the energy industrial complex asset owners and end users.

The EDRC brings innovators together to advance the industry through digital resource sharing (like the weekly Energy Drone & Robotics Newsroom, resources on the website, blogs, podcasts and webinars), as well as live, virtual and hybrid events (including the annual Global Gathering, as well as smaller meetups throughout the year).

Subscribe and every Tuesday get the top use cases, projects and tech to stay in-the-loop on industrial drones, robotics, automation, geospatial and