The workshop held on April 28 demonstrated to the industrial companies of Bristol new robotic and aerospace technologies and concepts with potential application to Operation & Maintenance tasks of wind and solar energy, and offered a unique opportunity to generate business contacts and partnerships with the key technology partners of DURABLE in a time and cost-efficient B2B meetings
The workshop, organized by the University of West of England (UWE) in collaboration with DURABLE partners, was held on April 28 at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
This workshop showed novel technologies developed in DURABLE, a collaborative European R&D project in which 12 partners have demonstrated improvements such as the automation of inspection and repair tasks or the rapid replacement of parts, reducing costs and improving the productivity of the new plants. During the workshop, key technology partners presented their contributions to the project's outcome and shared the latest knowledge and trends in the sector:
- VICE - Virtual Immersive Cockpit Environment: A versatile virtual cockpit to remotely supervise and control a multi-system of heterogeneous vehicles was presented by Patxi Berard from ESTIA
- Jesús Capitán from the University of Seville explained the methodology of the trajectory planning for a formation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles inspecting a wind turbine and the positive results obtained during the simulations
- Pablo Lopez from LORTEK showed the results of the non destructive wind turbine blade and solar panel inspection based in thermography and electroluminescence
- Alberto Vale from IST Lisboa presented ground navigation technologies and the progress on the mission of testing a terrestrial robot for the inspection of a real PV park in a bumpy and grassy terrain
As an additional opportunity, the workshop ended up with an interesting B2B meetings session where participants had the opportunity to generate business contacts and partnerships with the key technology partners of DURABLE.
For more information about the technologies considered and their current level of development, you can refer to the Technology Booklet.
The previous day to the workshop, DURABLE partners took the opportunity to meet in the Arnolfini arts gallery at Bristol to discuss the last steps of the project and to organize the solar and wind pilots that will demonstrate the feasibility of the technologies developed within the project in the next months.
