Bonus: BladeBug and DroneBase – the future of automated wind turbine inspections

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Uptime sits down with Chris Cieslak of BladeBug to discuss the latest additions to their revolutionary crawling robot platform. Then, Greg Lorenz of DroneBase lays out the latest in world-wide wind turbine imagery and data management. BladeBug - https://www.bladebug.co.uk DroneBase - https://dronebase.com/industries/wind Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com Wind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.com Weather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.com Intelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: This is a special bonus episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Listeners to the podcast know we love to speak with the movers and shakers in the wind industry, and while attending the Wind Industry Hamburg Exhibition, Joel and I sat down with a number of terrific guests. And now we are bringing them to you. Our faithful listeners. First up is Chris Che, director at Blade Bug, and Chris brings us the latest news on the Blade Bug Inspection Robot and how Blade Bug is the perfect solution for detailed ultrasound inspections for blades. And then Greg Lauren, senior product manager at Drone Base updates Joel and me on the latest in drone inspections and how to manage the massive amount of inspection data. This is a great episode, so stay tuned. I'm here with Blade Bug Director Chris Chest, like thank you very much from the uk and you have brought over Blade Bug. This, so I, I actually got to see the Blade Bug robot for the first time in person, but I've only seen it on YouTube . But it is impressive. And, and, and you made some. I'll call item improvements more, more like modifications to them. What's, what's the, what's the new pieces to a blade bug at the moment? Chris Cieslak: Yeah, so we have the, we've brought with us the new sort of proof of concept robot, which is essentially the same robot that we currently have for field trials and testing. Yeah. But we've been working with a Danish or Scandinavia and industrial design company called Egg Designs. Yeah. Based in Norway and Denmark. Okay. And they've been working with us to. Understand things like user journeys and basically enable them to help us cover the robot in a casing to give it weather protection, environmental protection, but also ergonomic design. So it's got handles handless. Yes. I notice how easy it's it, it's for us. It shows what the, the products of. Blade bug will look like. Yeah. And it just means that people can join the dots of go, okay, this was the prototype, this is now what the, the product can look like. And it's, yeah. It's been really fantastic to have the physical robot here and to show people such as yourselves what it is, because people see, people have seen it for quite a while on, on YouTube, or they might have seen a, a photo of it, but I think people love to be able to physically see it and see the scale of it. The scale of it. Yeah. See it is the size of a hat. No, it's not the size of Allen Hall: a hat, but no, it, it is a decent size though. I think when you put it in perspective of Blade, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. That the size you had chosen and it, it, it has evolved quite a bit from, I first saw it and it's now I think in, in two the, Hey, let's get it out there in the world and, and do some damage with it. The, the, the one thing I was noticing at your booth there is it has add-on capabilities and, and like a payload. To do ultrasound measurements. And that is fascinating because there really is,