Clobotics Showcases at DJI AirWorks China
Last week, the DJI Industry Innovation Conference (DJI AirWorks China 2018) with the theme “Technology Openness and Eco-Win-Win” was held at the Holiday Inn Shanghai Jinshan. Mr. Zhao Li, co-founder and chief revenue officer of Clobotics, was invited to give a speech as an important partner of DJI in the alternative energy wind power industry.

Unlike most of the drone hardware companies that participated in this event, Clobotics is the only one that excels in the integration of smart hardware and AI. During the twenty-one months since Clobotics’ establishment, the company has independently developed the autonomous drone inspection and image data recognition/analysis platform for wind turbine blade defects.

In the wind power industry, the inspection of the blades is essential to preventative maintenance of the wind turbines, and it has always been a great challenge. The traditional methods of inspection use ground-based telescope or have workers to climb up to the turbines and to check small cracks manually. For large-scale wind farms, the traditional methods of inspection are costly, data collected are not consistent in quality, and analysis take days to generate. Meanwhile, it is extremely difficult to identify the minor problems of wind turbines manually. Therefore, a new solution to achieve more accuracy in inspections is needed.
Clobotics aims to make the wind turbine inspection process safer, faster, and cheaper. By providing an end-to-end intelligent solution to wind farm operators, now each inspection only requires 15 minutes for the entire turbine, and defects are being automatically annotated and analyzed by computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Finally, time-stamped data are displayed, and reports are generated on the customer portal. With Clobotics’ solution, all the raw data, reports and annotations are all in one place, making it easier for the O&M team to make informed decisions.
Value 1: Helping companies reduce costs while improving efficiency
With Clobotics’ solution, wind turbine blade inspections are made more manageable and operational risks are avoided. After the use of the calculation, Clobotics’ autonomous drone inspection can help wind farm operators to save up to 80 percent of the cost compared to the traditional way of inspection. Clobotics solution allows wind turbines companies to save more in inspection and thus to be able to invest in more commercial value.
Value 2: Improve troubleshooting accuracy and predictive maintenance
Clobotics’ solutions enable fast, complete, and clear wind farm inspection coverage. The computer vision algorithm resolves millimeter-level defects and creates complete and high-quality digital images of the fan blade.
Regarding the ability to capture clear and complete high-precision images, Zhao Li gave an interesting and vivid example at the conference:

As shown above, the Clobotics team undesignedly captured an image of a fly on the blade. This is evidence showing the high definition of images captured, which makes our engineering team and customers very excited.
Value 3: Realize digital asset management through a full lifecycle platform
Clobotics’ lifecycle digital platform fills the gap in the international history of wind turbine blades. The historical data provided by the image index can be used to improve the operational efficiency of the wind farm itself.

As Clobotics continues to collect huge amount of data on geographic region, weather conditions, and blade manufacturers, Clobotics’ platform can provide insights to site selection of the subsequent wind farm construction and predict the damage degree of the wind turbine appearance (blade & tower surface) in different meteorological environments. Clobotics will truly disrupt how the inspections are done in wind power inspection.
