Robots for Maintenance:

The evolution from infrastructure

inspection to repair.
A U GU S T 2 0 1 9
Introduction
M obile robots have transformed the process of inspecting assets in a
wide range of industries. Today, they can crawl up walls, fly past towers,
slither through pipes, and navigate through deep waters. And they are used
to assess everything from wind turbine blades to pipelines and the insides of
large industrial vessels.
Companies are now creating robotic
As sophisticated as inspection robots are,
platforms that can maintain and repair
they are really just the beginning of a broader
industrial assets.
evolution. A number of companies are now
building on the capabilities of inspection robots to take them to the next level
and create platforms that can maintain and repair assets.
This evolutionary shift is still in its early stages, and there is a distance to
go before we see the widespread use of this next generation of robotics. But
more and more companies and researchers are steadily working through the
challenges and coming up with innovative approaches to making the devices
more effective, more autonomous, and more practical. Their efforts are mov-
ing the evolution of robots forward and paving the way to the widespread use
of robotics in maintenance and repair.

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 2

Safer, Faster, Cheaper
T he appeal of robots that can repair and maintain assets is similar to that
of inspection robots—they help keep people out of dangerous, high-risk
environments, such as towers and industrial tanks.
Mobile robots are now being used or piloted in a number of areas. They
can examine cables and pipes underwater, snake through small pipes and
sewers, climb and inspect suspension bridge cables, fly along electricity
transmission lines, check antenna angles on cell phone towers and look
for small defects in wind-turbine blades high off the ground—among other
things.
Costs, too, are a factor. Having people work in elevated locations or en-
closed spaces often means setting up scaf- “In some cases, robots can also
folding, using ropes to rappel down surfaces, operate in dangerous environments
or setting up cranes and lifts—all of which can like chimneys without requiring a
add up. shutdown of operations, avoiding
“When there’s work being done on a flare outage costs altogether.”
stack at an oil and gas facility it can cost
$750,000 to $1.25 million for the scaffolding alone,” says Bob Dahlstrom,
CEO of Apellix, a Jacksonville, Florida-based maker of aerial robotics sys-
tems. “The rule of thumb is for work at heights, that 60 percent of the cost is
access.”

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 3

 Robots don’t require that access set up time and they can often perform
work quickly. That shortens the amount of time assets need to be out of
service. Having a large ocean-going ship out of service for painting and
other work might cost a company $1 million a day in carrying costs and
lost revenue, says Dahlstrom, “so shortening the length of time it takes to
complete that work is quite valuable.” In some cases, robots can also operate
in dangerous environments like chimneys without requiring a shutdown of
operations, avoiding outage costs altogether.
Advancing technology is making a wider range of robotic applications
possible. Apellix uses a variety of sensors to control its aerial robots, and that
technology has quickly become better and cheaper. As a result, the company
can now use commercial, off-the-shelf, or COTS, sensors. In addition, Dahl-
strom says, “we’ve seen a hodge-podge of multiple communication protocols
move toward one standard—to a great extent because of the work being
done on autonomous vehicles in the auto industry.”
But creating repair and maintenances robots is not easy, and the challeng-
es found with inspection robots are amplified. Payloads that can perform re-
pairs are often heavier and larger than inspec- “We are also working on a robotic
tion sensors. Repair tools introduce torque and arm to be mounted on one of our plat-
other forces, require more robust platforms, forms that can do things like hold a
and use more power. And keeping it all small drill or other tools, allowing the robot
enough to enter constricted and hard-to-reach to execute a variety of maintenance
areas is difficult. tasks.”
“It can look simple at first, but the devil is
really in the details,” says Ekkehard Zwicker, CEO of GE Inspection Robotics,
the Zurich-based joint venture of GE Power Services and the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zürich.
As companies tackle these problems, the evolution of repair and main-
tenance robots is moving forward gradually. For example, GE Inspection
Robots has a magnetic crawler platform that can carry a variety of inspec-
tion equipment. The company is now working to expand the kind of work its
robots can handle. “We are going step-by-step,” Zwicker says. “Right now,
we are focusing on cleaning surfaces in preparation for inspection, and then
various maintenance and repair tasks are coming after that.”
One of the company’s robots is designed to clean the water walls—tubes
welded in parallel—in coal-fired boilers. Weighing 80 kg, it runs on magnet-
ic rollers that can swivel, allowing it to go up and down or across the rows
of tubes. The patented rollers also allow the robot to transition through
90-degree corners from floor to wall or wall to roof. In addition to inspection
equipment, the robot can carry cleaning tools—such as waterjet, dry ice,
sand blasting tools—fed by a pump outside the boiler, to remove debris and
enhance boiler performance. The company is also implementing tools that

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 4

will remove paint and coatings and then repaint the affected area.
“We are also working on a robotic arm to be mounted on one of our plat-
forms that can do things like hold a drill or other tools, allowing the robot to
execute a variety of maintenance tasks,” Zwicker says.
The company’s cleaning robot is controlled by operators outside the boiler;
human entry is not required. But it can automatically detect tubes and recog-
nize and correct for deviations from the correct driving path. In addition, the
company’s system uses information from the robots to build an off-site digital
twin of the vessel. This can be used be used to support later work within the
vessel, including repairs, says Jim Disser, North American sales manager
at GE Inspection Robotics: “Engineers can look at these vessels in a virtual
space and a virtual situation, run the virtual robot around inside the vessel,
and understand where they are going and what the potential obstacles might
be. They can completely plan where the robot has to go in a virtual environ-
ment, before setting one foot on the actual site.”

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 5

Enhancing the platform
S imply getting repair robots to where they need to work can be a chal-
lenge—and that can produce some innovative solutions. Automaker Rolls
Royce, for example, is reportedly developing a snake-like robot that can work
its way through engines to perform repairs. And Lufthansa had created an
automated milling robot that uses suction cups to attach to airplane wings in
order to repair defects.
To help reach work areas up to 100 m high, the Apellix drone uses a robotic
arm to make contact with high structures, rather than simply flying nearby,
which requires significant accuracy in terms of navigation. “We have very
precise locational data that lets the drone make contact with the structure,”
Dahlstrom says. “With drones that are doing visual inspections, it’s OK to be
a foot or two off the location, because the camera can still be trained on the
right spot.”
But making contact with a structure, the flight has to be much more precise
in order to place instruments correctly or avoid a crash. “If we are off by even
three inches, it could be catastrophic,” he says.
The Apellix drone platform can be configured to carry a variety of devices.
Currently, it is used primarily to perform contact-based non-destructive test-
ing of metal and coating thicknesses on large above-ground oil and gas stor-
age tanks or to place sensors on structures. But that repertoire is expanding
quickly. For example, Apellix is now creating
“Today we’re placing sensors and
a drone for use in interior and closed indus-
taking contact-based measurements.
trial spaces. In addition, it will soon offer a
Tomorrow, we’re going to be drilling,
spray-painting application that uses a tether to
sanding, welding, and doing other
keep the drone supplied with power and paint,
types of contact-based tasks.”
enabling it to perform work for long periods of
time. That will be followed by a spray painting
drone designed for industrial use.
“That will be for applications and coatings that are not the typical latex
paint, but things like epoxies,” Dahlstrom says. “These are things that are ap-
plied at something like 1.6 gallons per minute rather than the one-third gallon
per minute of traditional paint. And if a person were applying them, they’d
have to be wearing a protective body suit.”
Dahlstrom foresees a range of potential uses for the drone. “Today we’re
placing sensors and taking contact-based measurements,” he says. “Tomor-
row, we’re going to be drilling, sanding, welding, and doing other types of
contact-based tasks.”
A key innovation in these platforms is the aerial robotics guidance system
developed by Apellix. During much of an operation, the drone flies autono-

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 6

mously. Once a pilot on the ground positions the aircraft near the inspection
target, the drone takes over, using its onboard computer to fly to the struc-
ture, perform tasks, and then return to a safe zone away from the structure to
await further instructions from the operator.
To make that possible, Apellix had to rethink the traditional approach to
guiding drones.
When flying visually from the ground or using onboard cameras, ground
operators typically find it difficult to get a drone to a specific spot on a struc-
ture, and the traditional technology-based navigation aids often don’t work
in industrial settings. For example, GPS systems that are hovering next to
a large ship may not be able to connect with satellites to find their location.
Nearby metal structures may make compass readings unreliable for orienting
the drone. And barometric pressure readings used to determine altitude can
be skewed when drones are close to large, solid walls.
Apellix gets around these problems by combining a variety of sensors and
using its onboard computer to analyze their data to precisely locate the drone
in 3D space. For example, Dahlstrom says, “if you’re 10 meters out from your
target and you’ve got a good satellite link, the robot knows its x-y-z coordi-
nates, and can extrapolate from that. If it knows it’s moving north from that

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 7

point at this particular speed and it can calculate where it is and when it is
going to make contact with the target.”
At times, conditions such as sun reflecting off of a stainless-steel tank
might blind some sensors, he adds. “That’s why you have to have a multiple
array of different technologies so that you can always have the data reputa-
tion score and be able to figure out what’s accurate and what’s not.”

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 8

Bringing more tools to the job
W hile some companies are working on platforms that deliver tools to
where work needs to be done, others are working on the devices that
can ride on those platforms. To that end, RE2 Robotics has developed robotic
arms that closely mimic human arms, and can be mounted on various plat-
forms—which opens the door to using a variety of tools.
“With the emergence of a new type of robotic arms that are ‘human-like,’
the ability to have robots maintain and repair increases exponentially, simply
because of the fact that the world is designed by humans for humans,” says
Jorgen Pedersen, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh-based company. As
a result, he says, “robots will soon be maintaining and repairing manufactur-
ing equipment, vehicles, infrastructure like bridges and buildings, and even
robots themselves.”
The company’s arms “can perform at near human performance at human
scale,” Pedersen continues. “This does not mean that the arms necessar-
ily need to be anthropomorphic, but they exhibit unique attributes that are
innately human.”
“Robots will soon be maintaining and
One model of the company’s Highly Dexter-
repairing manufacturing equipment,
ous Manipulation System has two arms and a
vehicles, infrastructure like bridges and
torso.
buildings, and even robots themselves.”
“Each arm has 7 degrees of freedom and
the torso has 2 degrees of freedom, totaling 16 degrees of freedom, exclud-
ing any end of arm tooling such as a gripper.” He notes that each arm’s 7
degrees of freedom matches the range of the human arm. This model weighs
just 45 pounds, but can lift 110 pounds, driven by a 48 V battery. “We are
truly nearing human performance,” he says.
In developing the arms, RE2 found that there were no COTS components

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 9

that would let the company meet its size and weight requirements.
“We could not take the traditional approach of buying a COTS motor, COTS
drivetrain, and COTS motor controller and integrate them together. This would
have just created another variant of robotic arms typically seen in the industri-
al automation market,” Pedersen says. “So we needed to make custom parts
or modify COTS parts to achieve our requirements. In particular, we had to
develop our own proprietary motor controller in order to make our arms small
enough and light enough to claim to be ‘human-like.’ ”
The company’s arms have already shown their versatility in the field. For
example, the military has used them to dispose of explosive ordnance, such
as IEDs, and the energy industry has used “The last thing you want to do is design
them to safely repair and dismantle equipment an autonomous system that can go
and structures. At one point, says Pedersen, in and do everything, but then have to
“These arms were placed into the cabs of have a person come back and check up
construction equipment to turn those manned on its work.”
assets into unmanned assets so that an op-
erator could operate the vehicle to remotely perform dangerous tasks during
Hurricane Michael cleanup activities.”
On another front, some companies are integrating payloads, platforms, and
sophisticated software to let robots do more and more of the “thinking” need-
ed to operate autonomously. That’s the goal of a project at Colorado School
of Mines in Golden, where a team is working on a robot that can handle an
entire end-to-end repair process.
The Mines team is developing a magnetic crawler that will operate auton-
omously to navigate across interior furnace walls in coal-fired boilers. As
it moves, it will use a variety of nondestructive testing sensors to conduct
inspections and find areas that need repair. When such an area is found, it
will use various repair devices, including fusion and solid-state welding tools,
to fix the problem. It will then re-inspect the area to make sure the repair was
done correctly. That’s important “because the last thing you want to do is de-
sign an autonomous system that can go in and do everything, but then have
to have a person come back and check up on its work,” says Hao Zhang,
assistant professor of computer science at Mines, and the lead investigator
on the project.
The robot will rely on artificial intelligence to enhance its ability to operate
autonomously. For example, AI will handle onboard data fusion, allowing the
robot to manage and “understand” the wealth of data from its sensors. AI will
also automatically collect data to create 3D layered maps that the robot can
use to navigate and to identify changes in boiler walls over time. And it will be
used for “continual learning,” which will let the robot get better at its job over
time.
“We don’t want humans to be in the loop of dangerous tasks,” Zhang

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 10

says. “This will let the robot learn to recognize different types of damage and
threats on the wall—whether it’s a crack or a coating problem or some other
issue.”
The Mines robot is still in the design stage, and the team expects to com-
plete it in two years. To do so, they need to “bridge the technological gaps in
live inspecting and repairing of power plant boilers,” Zhang says. That means
designing their own nondestructive sensors, finding and modifying the right
live repair tools, and finding ways to miniaturize equipment, such as power
supply and industrial welding equipment.

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 11

Machines, humans working together
A s robots bring increasing sophistication to repair and maintenance,
the way they are controlled and guided becomes an important factor.
Increasing autonomy can take over a lot of their operation. But some tasks
still call for human control, and companies are working at making the ma-
chine-human interface more user friendly
For example, the RE2 arms can operate autonomously as they can also be
teleoperated by a human for more complicated work. The company has de-
veloped a imitative controller (IC), that consists of a scale model of the actual
arms, with a flight-stick input device at the end of each model arm that lets a
person remotely control the real arms, any tools at the end of the arms, and
whatever robotic platform is carrying the arms.
“The IC provides a highly intuitive interface for the operator to a level where
the operator feels like the manipulators are an extension of him or herself,”
Pedersen says. He adds that a new operator can be trained in minutes and
become proficient at controlling the arms within a few hours. When visu-
alization sensors are used at the actual job site, “an operator is provided
with a highly effective telepresence capability that could be used to perform
complex repair and maintenance tasks remotely—even from the other side of
the planet.”
The way humans work with robots is especially important to Robotic Tech-
nologies of Tennessee (RTT) in Cookeville, Tennessee. The company makes
robots that weld steel plates together, which are currently used on aircraft
carriers, destroyers, and other U.S. Navy vessels. The company’s goal was to
bring the sophisticated robotic welding capabilities found in modern manu-

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 12

facturing facilities, such as auto plants to other fields that have not been able
to invest in robotic cells.
“Instead of bringing the work piece to the welding robot, like an assembly
line, we are taking the welding robot to the work,” says Jamie Beard, the
company’s founder and president.
RTT’s welding platforms are wheeled, magnetic robots that climb the sides
of ships and other steel structures, using various sensors to scan the surface,
locate seams and then weld plates together. Building on that capability, the
company has recently enhanced the platform to enable it to perform more
tasks. “We’ve equipped the mobile welding robot arm with surface-prepara-
tion tools for grinding, plasma blasting, and cold spray tooling, specifically
targeting repair work,” Beard says.
A person can work alongside the
The ability to perform maintenance and
robot, with both working to complete
repair work is also supported by the platform’s
their task, or one person can manage
ability to move in unstructured environments,
several robots at once.
such as uneven, curved, or inverted surfaces.
The company has focused on making the platform an effective “cobot” that
can work in conjunction with human employees. It can be carried by one per-
son, so it can easily be brought into and used in various work environments,
Beard says. The company has also made the robot easy to program for end
users who are not robotics specialists, making it both simple and cost-effec-
tive.
“You don’t need a programmer on site,” he says. “The person doing the
welding can program the robot to make it do what he wants it to do.”
A person can work alongside the robot, with both working to complete their
task, or one person can manage several robots at once. Overall, the platforms
are intended to help increase worker productivity as well as enhance safety.

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 13

The Path Forward
A s robots become more capable, it’s easy to imagine how they could be
used to transform maintenance and repair. With that in mind, a group
of universities in the United Kingdom has launched a “self-repairing cities”
initiative, with the goal of automating street repair and maintenance by
2050. Plans call for drones that can do repairs such as updating streetlights,
swarms of flying vehicles conducting autonomous inspection and repair of
highways, and robots that stay for long periods in utility pipes to maintain
and repair those assets.
That’s an ambitious vision, but robotics companies are serious about
moving forward, and so are their potential end users. The Mines project,
for example, is collaborating with the power company Xcel Energy and is
supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. And GE Inspection Robotics
is partnering with companies such as Chevron, Dow, and Equinor.
“Our customers are asking us about cleaning and maintenance robots,”
says GE’s Jim Disser. A key challenge, he adds, is having to develop robots
to work in environments that were made for people—and designing industri-
al spaces with robots in mind could significantly increase the effectiveness
of automated repairs. That’s a long-term solution, of course. But, Disser
says, “we are starting to see some of the more progressive big majors [ener-
gy companies] looking at potentially designing future facilities with robotics
in mind, to be much more robot-friendly.”
Beyond costs and safety, other factors will also push industries toward
maintenance and repair robots. Robots could help address the shortage of
engineers and skilled labor in the field, for example.
At the same time, says RTT’s Jamie Beard, younger workers entering the
workforce “just aren’t going to jobs that are as labor-intensive as they have
been. And the younger people will expect to see higher levels of automation
and more technology-driven interactions.”
Overall, Beard says, widespread adoption will probably take time, “but as
we continue to evolve our platforms and interact with the end users, we’ll
get there.”

August  2019 Mechanical  Engineering Magazine Special Report 14

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nance—The evolution from infrastructure inspection to repair” is a publication
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