With
the fast growth of the alternative energy market worldwide, it is not
surprising that the industry is embracing the latest technologies to ensure
increased productivity, efficiency, and safety. Alternative energy operations
are typified by harsh environmental conditions, hazardous tasks, and remote
locations, making the introduction of unmanned systems to inspect, secure, maintain,
and repair a smart choice.
“From renewable energy wind farms to
hydroelectric facilities, people probably envision drones flying over these
plants for security and inspection purposes. But you must think beyond the
aerial drone and understand that there are crawling robots, driving robots,
cleaning robots, and even construction robots. All these Unmanned Ground
Vehicles (UGVs) are used today by the renewable energy industry. Further,
Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are incorporated into shore operations.
Air, land, and sea autonomous platforms augment the quest for renewable fuel
sources,” says Teresa Huysamen, Wireless Business Unit Executive at Duxbury
Networking, local distributors of Rajant technology.
These systems have complex payloads
to carry out repetitive, redundant, and often dangerous tasks. These autonomous
robots carry high-resolution and infrared cameras, live-stream video, sensors,
and more that are expected to communicate dynamically. Additionally, navigation
and collision avoidance must be maintained without disruption to keep all
robotics moving.
“The greater the distance travelled
by the autonomous platform and the physical obstacles encountered, the more
critical it is that connectivity must not be disrupted. If a connection were
interrupted, vital data could be lost, and the platform could be rendered
immobile. Transmission of insights to central command is essential as is
machine-to-machine (M2M) communication,” Huysamen points out.
So, how do robots wirelessly
communicate with each other when they are often under harsh weather conditions
and located in highly remote areas? Typically, alternative energy plants begin
using cellular technology since long-term evolution (LTE) technology has
sufficient bandwidth for most applications. Eventually, they discover coverage
issues and dropped packets, because of blockage issues caused by wind turbines
and the solar panels themselves. Next, they turn to traditional Wi-Fi and start
to put fixed access points throughout the environment. Still, they discover
more coverage issues and blockages, and it becomes cost-prohibitive to continue
to add access points. Eventually, they realise they need to put the access
nodes directly on the equipment itself, including the robots.
“Rajant’s Kinetic Mesh overcomes
these problems with wireless nodes called BreadCrumbs®. Offered in an array of
sizes and price points, BreadCrumbs can be affixed anywhere and to anything for
constant connectivity. The BreadCrumbs also function on multiple frequencies to
ensure the essential Wi-Fi connection. As the wind or solar farm becomes
larger, or the number of unmanned systems is increased, so the Rajant network
scales to meet the demand and remains just as reliable. Quick to deploy and
easy to install, Rajant is integral to enabling robotics for the alternative
energy sector,” says Huysamen.