Working near York with BT and two radio and rigging technicians, Katie and Colin, testing out Robot Squirrel, and putting it through its paces.
Usually, to inspect monopoles, the engineers would have ladders, safety ropes or some scalability and be working at height. The team at Acuity Robotics supported them in giving some pointers for inspection.
As you can see in the video, it’s quick to deploy, it can climb and gains a good visual view. But of course, it’s not just about the robots. It’s about generating data, sensing data on the infrastructure to see if it might be rusting from the inside out, looking at the surface, with the high resolution camera and also then going and having a look at the connections between the telecoms equipment and the structure itself. And by doing this, we’re obviously speeding up the process of inspection, removing engineers from danger and operating at height when they don’t need to.
We are also creating an asset in the data which BT can use going forward to enable predictive maintenance over time.
