Custom Robotics for Complex Challenges: How SKA Robotics Builds What Industry Needs

SKA Robotics supplies custom-made systems for industry

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

As drone manufacturers and other high-tech industries scale up their manufacturing capabilities, they tend to look for tried-and-true technological equipment and processes to enable them to mass produce their products.

However, sometimes they encounter a unique logistical or technological challenge that requires a custom-made solution, one which had not been previously developed.

This is where companies such as SKA Robotics come in. The Pittsburgh-based company, which presented examples of its bespoke technology at the Energy Drone + Robotics conference in The Woodlands, Texas recently, offers hardware, software and systems engineering services for commercial and industrial robots.

One of the company’s most recent projects involves working with a UAV company to design an artificial intelligence (AI) system for drone operations, SKA President Spencer Krause said in his presentation. He added that while it was too early to talk about the project in detail, the company likely would be able to release more information on its drone initiative in the fourth quarter of this year.

“We try to create generalizable, repeatable solutions as much as possible. But we’re not trying to sell you some widget off the shelf. We want to build something that’s actually designed for the problem you have,” Krause said on the sidelines of the conference.

Krause said SKA’s goal is to design robotic systems that work with people to decrease the difficult or dangerous aspects of their jobs and to enable the human workers to accomplish their tasks faster and more efficiently.

SKA Robotics’ staff is composed of “100 of the most skilled robotics engineers in the world,” he said. “We’re talking the top 1% of talent to solve some of the most difficult hardware, software and systems engineering problems. We’re trusted by brands like Siemens Energy, Google, and Caterpillar because we’re fast, deterministic and elite.”

SKA focuses much of its efforts toward developing equipment and processes to facilitate the production of energy.

One recent project, developed for the Sarcos Technology and Robotics Corporation, called for the development of a workflow solution to automate the construction of multi-square-mile solar fields using a number of different types of robots. Before the development of the system, the job of solar field construction was difficult and labor-intensive.

“You can’t find people that are willing to work in 120 degrees, lifting solar panels that weigh sometimes 70 pounds over their heads over and over and over again,” Krause said. “There’s a lot of burnout in the job, but what you can do is find people that are willing to do the fine adjustment, higher-level tasks.”

SKA worked on both the hardware aspect of the job – developing a functional architecture for the system and synthesizing its physical components – and on the perception engineering side – developing algorithms for the classification and siting of solar panels across a range of lighting conditions using multiple sensing and data-processing modalities.

By replacing much of the manual labor of building the solar field with robotic workers, the project’s partners were able to improve safety conditions and cut down on labor costs, with one of the former work crew members being promoted to having oversight for the entire construction program, Krause said.

In another noteworthy project, SKA developed a system that employed AI and non-lethal deterrents such as loud audio signals and low-intensity lasers, to locate and deter intruders trying to break into a power plant.

“In this case, the way that it works is it starts with a warning,” Krause said. “What the intruder sees is basically just an orange dot on the ground that’s projected in front of them as they get closer.”

If the intruder proceeds ahead, there’s an audible warning broadcast from three directional speakers that lets him or her know, “Hey, you shouldn’t be here. Please go away.” If the trespasser doesn’t heed the warning and continues to move forward, a system of beams of light is directed at the person’s face to temporary blind them. Several beams are spread out in a pattern, with the beams about 20 degrees apart from one another, to be able to shine in the intruder’s eyes regardless of whether he turns his head or tries to shield his eyes.

Then, if despite the unpleasant sensations caused by the noise and the lights, the intrusion continues, the volume of the directional sound system is amped up to where it’s actually painful. By this point security officers usually have had time to arrive on the scene to subdue the disoriented but uninjured trespasser.

Krause cited a third example of how SKA’s technology improved a client company’s workflow and saved the company money. The project, executed in partnership with Siemens Energy last year, co-developed and installed a custom-built robot for Siemens’ generator maintenance team.

Siemens uses the robot to tighten fasteners inside 1-gigawatt utility-scale generators, while driving in the air gap between the generator’s rotor and the stator. This robotic system allows the company to perform routine maintenance on 1,500 to 2,500 fasteners without needing to disassemble the generator.

“This gets a 10-day maintenance cycle down to a seven-day cycle, which saves the asset owner. $1.7 million,” Krause said. He added that SKA was able to complete the project within four months, from design phase to construction to having a working robot out on the job.

Krause said the way SKA likes to work is to assign a team of experts to develop a robotic solution to solve a difficult problem for a client. “We knock out the really hard parts,” he said. “So, companies tend to come to us with the hardest stuff, stuff that they would never be able to get at because it’s too unbound, it’s too unstructured, it’s too difficult.”

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.