RDI Technologies, a manufacturer of motion amplification vibration analysis solutions, is bringing its motion amplification technology to Boston Dynamics' mobile robot, Spot.

The new camera-based solution, Iris Explorer payload for Spot, will combine the mobility and automation of Spot with vibration analysis motion amplification technology. This enables industrial customers to take next-generation vibration analysis directly to the asset in even the most remote or hazardous environments. The Iris Explorer robotic solution lets customers perform high volume, highly repeatable autonomous route-based vibration analysis with reduced risk and increased efficiency.

Source: RDI Technologies

"Our integration with Boston Dynamics creates significant opportunities to transform asset heavy industries," explained Jeff Hay, CEO RDI Technologies. "Vibration analysis is a high value part of every asset maintenance program. In bringing together industry leading vibration analysis and robotics in RDI's Iris Explorer Spot payload, we're providing critical tools to address challenging business problems — increasing safety and productivity while improving operations and assets in complex industrial environments. We're already seeing customers gain more value from the unique pairing of Motion Amplification technology with Spot's agility and teleoperation capabilities."

The Iris Explorer payload is driven by RDI's motion amplification technology. Measuring deflection, displacement, movement and vibration not visible to the human eye, motion amplification technology turns every pixel in the camera's view into a sensor capable of measuring vibration or movement with high levels of accuracy. It provides instant visual imagery of hard to detect faults such as misalignment, bending, soft foot and separation, along with trending capability of vibration readings for monitoring of chronic or emergent issues.

Active condition monitoring is time-consuming work; if rushed or done improperly, data has little value and entire routes must be redone. Industrial operations benefit from Iris Explorer's Automated Feature Finding, which provides the ability to repeatedly and easily capture the exact same image data every time, across every route, for every asset and in any environment, as often as needed.

The Iris Explorer payload captures full field of view of an asset and allows for conditional, automated data triggers. As such, customers experience full data flexibility, allowing them to focus on the most relevant data without the need to repeat routes, which is a common problem in asset maintenance. Combined with Spot, route-based operations become seamlessly automated and can be remotely monitored. Customers can apply the same observation protocols on the thousandth inspection as it was programmed to do on the first, without human bias while controlling and performing routes remotely across plants, sites or different regions.

For manufacturing, power and utility generation, mining, and chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear customers who want to maintain peak performance of their assets while reducing risk and maintaining compliance, the Iris Explorer Spot payload allows users to cover more assets in a fraction of the time, providing for more asset coverage while acquiring more diverse and consistent data at reduced human risk.

For more information, visit the RDI Technologies website.