Our First Anniversary: Developing Inspection Ecosystem!
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that PetroBot Technologies is now 1 year old and growing..
This is a big milestone for our team. What started as a conversation during a family meet, and subsequently became our topic of research, has developed into a thriving organisation of 6 (and growing!), inquiries & trial request from more than 5 huge organisations without any publicity.
We have come a long way, but still have an even longer way to go!
Why are we doing this?
Industry owners all over the world face several hurdles inspecting the health of their assets. They can’t inspect the tanks(bottom plate loss etc) without stopping the operations of the tank. These can be summarised as
(i) Operational Loss due to shutdown of tank.
(ii) High Inspection Cost due to opening, cleaning and inspection of tank.
(iii) Disposal Issues of the sludge extracted from bottom of the tank.
These hurdles makes it tough for tank owner to afford frequent inspection.
We believe that these hurdles are a manifestation of a much deeper rooted issue which causes chemical spills from tanks putting wildlife and nearby communities at greater risk.
Inspection Provider at the same time faces the issue of cleaning the tank. Majority of cleaning task in the world of the tank is accomplished with the help of humans. And they face
(i) Safety Issue due to entry into confined space in tank.
(ii) Health Issue due to exposure to dangerous chemical and gases.
The issue is that most of the Industry owners and Inspection providers are not able to harness/adopt the power of robotics and technology to accomplish Non-Destructive Testing effectively using Robots.
The rest of us, living in urban centers and more developed parts of the world, might find it hard to relate to this, with both knowledge and technology available at our fingertip, these inspections can be done effectively and efficiently with the help of robots and software. And somebody has to do it.
What does PetroBot Technologies do to address this issue?
To tackle the issue, PetroBot needs to address the 2 primary reasons behind it:
- Reduce the losses of the owner during the inspection by doing In-Service Tank Inspection Service (ITIS). That is, inspecting the tank for corrosion loss in the bottom plate while the tank remains operational.
- Improve the safety aspect both for humans and the environment. The use of the robot for inspection removes the need for humans working in the tank as well as no need of cleaning the tank for inspection.
With these two features at their disposal, and Industry can finally able to go for frequent inspection without opening/cleaning the tank. This will reduce the chances of tank leakage from the bottom plate, thus serving both the owner and environment.
To make all of this a reality, the entire team is working extensively this year developing our first Inspection Tool/Robot called ITIS MARK-1, a remotely controlled robotic crawler specifically designed to inspect filled in operation storage tank’s floor bottom plates. This with PetroBot InSense platform will enable owners to understand the health of tank in a simple and elaborative way instead of PDF and Excel Sheets.
The Next Chapter
We are working tirelessly over the past few months to get to this point in our journey and has immense confidence in the product we have been able to develop so far.
But what’s coming next is even more thrilling and exciting.
With the development phase of ITIS MARK-1 is at its completion, we believe that we are on the cusp of disrupting the inspection industry of India using NDT robot. Rapid development post-lockdown has certainly brought us back on track and we are expecting to bring ITIS MARK-1 into the market at the beginning of Q2, 2021. Along with ITIS MARK-1, we are also working on PetroBot InSense and other product-related to inspection, will be presented to our customer soon.
So we’ll celebrate this milestone (Christmas too) for a day but after that, it’s back to work!
With gratitude to our customers, vendors and team,
Founding Team, PetroBot Technologies Pvt Ltd
