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Innovation
Case Study •
Ontario Power Generation wanted to see if Spot could be used to assist in tripping and racking out a breaker—an activity that is high risk for arc flash.
There are an estimated 30,000 instances of arc flash each year in the United States alone, and one to two fatalities occur daily in North America. Ontario Power Generation has five Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots deployed throughout their Enterprise Innovation division. In 2022, the team sought to see if Spot’s dexterous arm could be used to assist in tripping and racking out a 600 volt breaker—an activity that is high risk for arc flash. Now, Boston Dynamics engineers have taken this application to the next level by fully automating the procedure. Spot can perform the entire operation autonomously, with a human issuing high level commands safely out of harm’s way.
We had the circuit breaker, which had an issue with the electrical protection… In order to remove that breaker, it would be too hazardous for a human to go in there, so we’d have to make a larger outage to a bigger system. It probably would have taken several months to get to that point where we could do that work. And they asked if there’s a way to do it safely by using a robot to eliminate that hazard from the humans. Mike Di Lisi, Innovation Coordinator, OPG
We had the circuit breaker, which had an issue with the electrical protection… In order to remove that breaker, it would be too hazardous for a human to go in there, so we’d have to make a larger outage to a bigger system. It probably would have taken several months to get to that point where we could do that work. And they asked if there’s a way to do it safely by using a robot to eliminate that hazard from the humans.
To learn more about how OPG have put Spot to work since they received their first robot in 2020, check out some of the updates they’ve shared about their Spot fleet.
Vajire Jayasinghe, Tech Project Manager, OPG: In one year, we’ve seen how something can evolve from an ad hoc request into a fully developed production-ready tool that we could go deploy.
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Mike Di Lisi, Innovation Coordinator, OPG: I’m Mike Di Lisi. I’ve been working at Ontario Power Generation for about 15 years now, primarily in the innovation or Xlab team.
Jayasinghe: I think of ourselves as kind of a technology integrator. So we evaluate a lot of the brand new, very cool technologies that exist out in the world. And we find specific use cases within OPG that would benefit from the use of these technologies.
Di Lisi: Any time we can separate a human physically from that job, we know it’s going to make things safer. So we thought Spot might be a good fit for that. We tried it out and saw some immediate benefits.
Jayasinghe: We need the ability to kind of remotely deploy a tool to assess some more information. And it’s typically benefiting us by reducing the amount of radiation dose that a worker is going to take. So we call it radiation protection or in some cases, a conventional risk, like a worker risk that you’re able to alleviate a little bit by having the robot operate in lieu of that. And so those are the type of missions that have started accumulating in OPG’s space and we’ve seen a lot of real value from that.
Di Lisi: So the circuit breaker application with Spot: we had the circuit breaker, which had an issue with the electrical protection. And they needed to remove that breaker and take it out of service. In order to remove that breaker, it would be too hazardous for a human to go in there. So we’d have to make a larger outage to a bigger system. It probably would have taken several months to get to that point where we could do that work. And they asked if there’s a way to do it safely by using a robot to eliminate that hazard from the humans.
Jayasinghe: What we were able to do with some real practice in the Darlington Learning Center Breaker Lab, where we had a similar model of that breaker, was to practice on both the tripping of the breaker with the arm and then the ratcheting out using a socket. We also were able to get some support from Boston Dynamics directly for the ratcheting motion. So that when we were trying to rotate the tool, the arm had a special built-in function that was able to do that quickly for us.
So with a lot of practice and some effort here in the lab, we’ve gotten the confidence to say we can go execute this in the field.
Di Lisi: After we shared our experience, manually removing that breaker and some of the challenges, Boston Dynamics took that to OPEX. And they set up a lab test where they would see if they could perform some automation with Spot on this type of task. That was something really exciting to us in terms of being able to take a job, which we see as highly skilled, you need a highly skilled operator to perform that work and being able to now potentially hand that controller to someone with minimal time on Spot and perform a similar job much more repeatedly and efficiently.
Jayasinghe: It greatly simplifies what we would have to do if we wanted to go deploy this tool again to do the same type of job. Before, essentially, what was happening is we were very carefully manually manipulating the arm to go delicately trip a breaker. Then we were having another person in a full bomb suit run in, place the socket in place. Then we delicately move the arm in and do that.
You’re now looking at a much more streamlined approach where the robot is able to trip on its own, to place the tool in on its own, and to start the entire racking out process like fully autonomously. In terms of practicality for us to go do this in the field, it’s now a lot simpler of an evolution, even just to explain to our operations staff how it’s going to work. And we now no longer need to even have someone get close to even put in the tool. So you can have Spot be the only thing in the vicinity of the rack out activities.
Di Lisi: I think my favorite thing about spot is just the excitement it brings. I walk it through the plant, and I can’t make it 100 feet without stopping and talking to someone and hearing other ideas they have about innovation. Seeing it in the plant gets people excited about the fact that we’re actually trying to do things different and innovative.
Jayasinghe: We are creating small building blocks for a broader applications. It’s not just about the ability for this tool to rack out the breaker. What we’re trying to do internally as a company is educate as many of our folks as possible on the capabilities of the robot, so they can start looking at how they can internalize and find other new use cases for it. And that growth really to us is the value in Spot: its flexibility as a platform.
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