Sphere Drones recently worked with Veolia, a global leader in water, waste, and energy management, to increase its insights and safety at its water treatment plant and desalination plant on Australia’s east coast.
Veolia’s use cases
Veolia was interested in testing Boston Dynamics Spot at two of its east coast facilities. During these tests, Veolia were looking at a number of use cases, including leak detection, remote inspection, thermal inspection, and security patrols.
Leak detection
Veolia was interested in using Spot to detect leaks on-site without the need to disrupt operations and improve downtime. Spot, equipped with the Fluke SV600 can be tuned to a range of frequencies to detect leaks from critical equipment, such as motors, generators, pumps and water filters.
Remote thermal inspection
While operating, inspecting certain areas of Veolia’s sites is not possible due to an array of risk factors. Spot fits in perfectly, being able to enter the facilities without needing them to be shutdown. Spot’s operator can control it from a control centre while collecting all the required acoustic and thermal data from the Fluke SV600 and the Boston Dynamics CAM+IR.
Security patrols
Ensuring facilities are secure and no unauthorised people or unexpected wildlife creates added costs and risk for security personnel. Spot, equipped with the CAM+IR makes perimeter patrols easy and reliable. The thermal sensor on the CAM+IR makes spotting potential intruders during the night a breeze.
Testing Spot with Veolia
Throughout testing Spot was equipped with a number of payloads configured uniquely to the use cases mentioned above.
Persistent Systems MPU5
Ensuring a secure and stable connection to Spot, the Persistent Systems MPU5 mesh radio was utilised. The MPU5 gives Spot the ability to be controlled from over 10 kilometres away with control link fallbacks such as LTE if a direct stable connection is no longer achievable.
Fluke SV600
The Fluke SV600 is an acoustic imager designed to pinpoint specific sound signatures in an industrial environment. In this specific use case, the Fluke SV600 has been restricted to a known frequency range for leaks, allowing the leaks to be displayed in real-time on the operator’s display.
Boston Dynamics CAM+IR
Boston Dynamics' CAM+IR payload features a colour ring camera with a 360° field of view, for complete situational awareness while remotely operating the robot. The two main cameras sit on a pan-tilt-zoom head with a 30x optical zoom colour camera and a FLIR radiometric thermal camera.
