Percepto and Boston Dynamics to provide Multi-robot Inspection

Boston Dynamics and Percepto from Modi’in, Israel, have combined their products into an autonomous monitoring and inspection solution for dangerous and remote industrial sites. Founded in 2014, Percepto has developes the autonomus industrial drone Sparrow, as a drone-in-a-box solution. Sparrow was adopted to monitor some of the world’s leading utility, oil & gas sites, mining and other critical infrastructure facilities.

Lately the company moved to a higher level: It created an Autonomous Inspection & Monitoring (AIM) platform that can manage a fleet of third-party robots alongside Sparrow drone. By installing its own PerceptoCore payload on each drone, the cloud-based AIM provides visual data management and analysis to report trends and anomalies and to alert of risks. When a member of staff request data, Percepto AIM deploys the most suitable robot independently without human accompaniment to retrieve and stream the required data.

Here comes the cooperation with Boston Dynamics: Spot is an agile doglike mobile robot developed by Boston Dynamics that navigates terrain with unprecedented mobility. Percepto has integrated Spot with its AIM for automated inspection rounds completely controlled remotely via the platform. Spot carries Percepto’s PerceptoCore payload, which includes high resolution imaging and thermal vision sensors.

Spot and Sparrow working together at the Dead Sea, Israel
Spot and Sparrow working together at the Dead Sea, Israel

They are able detect issues including hot spots on machines or electrical conductors, water and steam leaks around plants and equipment with degraded performance, with the data relayed via AIM. “Combining Percepto’s Sparrow drone with Spot creates a unique solution for remote inspection,” said Michael Perry, VP at Boston Dynamics.

This week the company also won a financing boost to its vision: A strategic investment of $45 million in Series B funding led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) to launch its solution for remote, fully autonomous, asset monitoring and inspection. It brings the total investment in the company to $72.5 million.