Just as we’ve grown accustomed to aerial drones, be them for pleasure activities or blowing up tanks, we’ll soon have to make room in our lives for ground-based robots. And some of these are far more scary-looking than drones, because for some reason engineers thought shaping them like headless dogs would be nice.
That’s right, it’s the Boston Dynamics Spot we’re talking about today (there are others similar to it out there), thanks to the thing’s latest work-related stunt: automated inspection missions in semiconductor manufacturing facilities ran by a company called Globalfoundries.
As you already know by now, Spot is a tool, nothing more, designed to be used for a variety of tasks. You’ll probably not get to see one playing with your neighbor’s kids, but chances are soon enough you’ll see plenty of them on the floors of the world’s factories. Boston Dynamics is selling one for over $74,000, but with the actual robot dog, one gets the option to customize it with software and hardware to suit specific needs.
For the Globalfoundries application, the robot was tweaked by AI specialist Levatas, which gifted it with the ability to understand what it’s looking at and decide on a course of action based on that.
By patrolling the floor of the facility, and using the Levatas software, Spot is able to determine if something is wrong with the equipment it is looking at, and send the proper alerts to interested parties. More importantly, this Spot can read gauges, and interpret the readings.
Globalfoundries plans to use the data Spot keeps gathering to plan maintenance time, downtime, and prevent unwanted events.
“Manufacturing facilities are filled with thousands of inspection points, and adding fixed sensors to all these assets is not economical,” says Boston Dynamics.
“With Spot bringing the sensors to their assets, the team collects valuable information about the thermal condition of pumps and motors, as well as taking analog gauge readings. Since this equipment has a long life cycle and slow rate of change, the team can better monitor these assets over time - making better informed decisions to keep the facility running.”
Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies. Full profile
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