Companies promise to revolutionize the way Industry 4.0 manages assets, monitors infrastructure and predicts failures in operations with the use of drones and autonomous robots
The Brazilian Solvian, a company that provides solutions for monitoring environments and assets with IoT sensors for Industry 4.0, and the multinational Percepto, a leader in autonomous solutions for monitoring industrial facilities via drones and autonomous robots, have just closed a partnership. With the agreement, Solvian will expand the scope of its software for monitoring environments, assets and preventive maintenance of machines, which will start to predict failures that arrive as visual data also from the air, collected by autonomous drones, which do not need a pilot. With this, companies that use the software will be able to receive, in minutes, alerts and predictive analyzes from video and thermal images captured during a scheduled flight in places of difficult access, where engineers would take weeks and could make mistakes analyzing by the human eye.
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Daniel Vilas, general director of Solvian, speaks about the new partnership
According to Daniel Vilas, general director of Solvian, the solutions of the two companies complement each other and the synergy of the teams promises to accelerate the development and commercialization of the products in a market with a growing demand.
“Now, we can solve any monitoring need for any type of industry, even going as far as prediction, which is being able to predict that something will fail before it happens, whether by land, water, and now, together with Percepto, by air” .
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The goal is to grow not only in the offer of services, but also in the customer base in Brazil and Latin America. “Currently with clients in Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica, our expectation is to double in size compared to the previous year”, says Vilas, who expects to reach at least BRL 14 million in revenue by the end of 2022.
The executive explains that the drones will not be sold separately, but will be part of a SaaS model (Software as a Service), being managed by Percepto's software. Industries will be able to use the application over the internet, paying for the service as an annual subscription.
“The companies that contract the service will be trained to operate the drone and robot systems, to program the rounds, to read the reports, always with full monitoring by Solvian in Brazil. Support (level 1 and 2) will also be provided by Solvian, as well as maintenance of drones and robots. And, when necessary, support from Israel and the United States will be escalated”, explains Vilas.
Drones adapted for industrial activities
According to Dante Dominguez, sales director for Latin America at Percepto, as the drones are adapted for industrial activities, they fly over programmed locations and then return to a base, a kind of box, which recharges the drone's batteries by induction. “It's different from a normal drone, where you have to change the battery manually. In addition, it transfers the collected images and data (both visual and from the thermal camera) to a base gateway, which sends the data to the cloud and goes to Percepto, where the analyzes and processing of this data are carried out intelligently. artificial intelligence for reporting and BI”.
“Managers or engineers receive alerts about asset health no matter where they are in the world. After being advised that a problem has been found, and at what point in the video it appears, the company can, for example, zoom in on that image, and see that, if maintenance, replacement, or other repairs are not carried out, six months from now months or a year may have a bigger problem. This is the great advantage of the software. It performs analysis and prediction with machine learning algorithm and not only does it deliver images or videos to be analyzed by the human eye, but this is what the general public thinks about drones”, clarifies Daniel Vilas.
rising market
According to Droneii, specialized in research, Brazil will drive growth in the sector in South America – the country will continue to be the largest in the region, and should grow 11,3% annually between 2021 and 2026, a rate higher than large markets, such as the United States (6,8%) and China (9,7%). Among the three segments of this sector – services, hardware and software – the one that stands out the most is services, which should reach annual revenues of US$ 32,2 billion in 2026, representing 79,3% of the market. The area that should most use drone services is Energy. Today, it is already the main user and will remain so for the next few years, followed by Construction, Agriculture, Transport, Internal Logistics and Warehousing.
Florida Power & Light Company (FPL), one of the nation's leading power utilities, for example, uses Percepto's technology to survey its electrical distribution network, says Dante Dominguez. The drone can detect thermal anomalies up to 3 meters deep, underground. When it comes to electrical energy transmission towers, the drone can fly over the junction of the wires between the towers and identify by the thermal camera whether the wires are connected correctly or not, or if they are short circuiting.
Thus, it is possible to avoid, for example, a wire break, a power outage, and the company can carry out preventive maintenance in this environment. The objective of analyzing the data is always to prevent unexpected stoppages, downtime, that is, the company is obtaining a more effective, efficient, reliable and profitable use of its assets.
Perceptual System
According to Dante Dominguez, from now on, companies that have a monitoring device will be able to integrate with the Percepto system. “Assuming that a company has a fixed camera connected to inspect a certain industrial area, or another monitoring device, Percepto is able to take the information from that camera, or from any device, or robot, or even from images filmed with a cell phone, and insert all of this into the Percept software database. By joining the information, it is possible to generate a 3D model, analyzing that area from all points of view”.
In addition to its own offices in Israel, Germany, Australia and the USA, Percepto, which recorded revenues of US$ 45 million in 2020, has representatives in Europe, Asia and Latin American countries such as Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Peru and Colombia.
“The sector has enormous potential and Solvian's technological capacity in the area of software and sensors will still contribute a lot to our ambition to expand the limits of industrial automation in the world”, says Shykeh Gordon, Vice President of Global Sales at Percepto.