Drone Firm Clobotics Inspects Wind Turbines for Major European Company

AI startup Clobotics is partnering with European wind-energy company GEV Wind Power to deploy AI-based autonomous-drone blade inspections for turbines

“In the wind power industry, Clobotics is the only company to provide an end-to-end solution combining autonomous drone hardware with built-in computer vision, artificial intelligence and data analytics software for automated wind turbine inspections,” a Clobotics statement reads.

Using the Clobotics Smart Wind platform, inspection missions launch autonomous drones to fly near turbines, building a 3D picture of all the blades and capturing high resolution images in minutes, rather than hours. Images of blades are then automatically analyzed, annotated, and reported on the cloud-based customer portal. Using the portal, customers can track the entire lifecycle of turbines, see the progression of damage and view trend reports on individual turbines or their entire fleet.

“By combining deep industry expertise, a premiere global network and advanced AI technology, Clobotics and GEV are taking the lead in capturing the next wave of growth in this multi-billion-dollar market,” Clobotics CEO George Yan said.

GEV Wind Power services 130 wind farms across 13 countries throughout Europe and 17 wind farms in North America with more than 3,000 wind turbines repaired.

“We’ve been looking to add autonomous blade inspection to our range of product offerings but recognized that this requires enterprise-level expertise in AI technologies, which is very hard to come by,” David Fletcher, managing director of GEV Wind Power, said.

“When we saw Clobotics’ solution live, we were very impressed with the technological advancement compared to the other solutions we had seen. We are confident that Clobotics can deliver to GEV’s high standards of performance and safety on a global scale.”

Last year, Clobotics raised $11 million in funding in a continuation of its Series A round of financing, bringing total funding to $21 million.

“Our confidence of entering the most sophisticated wind markets comes from our strong technical backbone and continuous effort in innovation. We push technical boundaries so that our customers can focus on achieving their next level of productivity and growth,” said Yan.