April 2010

Swiss inspection robots win prestigious award

The traditionally close collaboration between research institutions and enterprises in Switzerland has proved itself once more: A joint project of ETH Zurich, EPF Lausanne, Alstom, and its joint venture and ETH spin-off Alstom Inspection Robotics (AIR) has been awarded with one of Europe’s most prestigious awards in robotics.

The participants of the joint project «Highly Compact Robots for Power Plant Inspections» (initiated by the Federal Innovation Promotion Agency (CTI)) received the highly respected «EUROP/EURON Robotics Technology Transfer Award». EUROP stands for European Robotics Technology Platform, EURON means European Robotics Research Network.

For three years a CTI project team of academic and corporate researchers has worked meticulously on robotic artificial inspectors for various types of power plants. The ETH scientists researched, tested and designed prototypes which were then taken by the AIR developers to industrial manufacturing.

The robots carry out highly specialized maintenance work. To this aim the mini-inspectors move or crawl into barely accessible areas of turbines and generators, search for cracks and all kinds of material defects by means of laser, ultrasound or Foucault current. The detected weak points are recorded and visualized just like on a map.

www.asl.ethz.ch/research/asl/CTI-Inspection
www.inspection-robotics.com
mobots.epfl.ch

Please see also: ETH Zürich receives funding from the EU
Please see also: Switch and Swiss universities receive the Educause award 2009
Please see also: IBM and ETH Zurich lay foundation stone for new nanotechnology lab

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