On June 7th, Levatas announced a strategic first-of-its-kind partnership with Boston Dynamics.
Based in West Palm Beach, Levatas is a leading provider of AI software and solutions for automating industrial inspections with robots, cameras and drones. The company creates and delivers end-to-end solutions that enable robots, drones, remote sensors, and camera systems to autonomously perform equipment monitoring, safety checks, and site surveillance tasks in industrial environments.
As part of the collaboration with Boston Dynamics, Levatas’ industrial AI software will be made available to Boston Dynamics customers through the 3.3 software release for the advanced mobile robot, Spot®, marking the first computer vision based inspection capability made available on the platform. The partnership expands on each company’s work to automate inspection tasks that are considered challenging, dangerous and otherwise undesirable for humans, freeing up employees in the field to handle more valuable work.
The MIT spinoff and Mass-based, Boston Dynamics, is on a mission is to imagine and create exceptional robots that enrich people’s lives. Building machines that can approximate the mobility, dexterity and agility of people and animals is a grand challenge. Curiosity and respect for the natural world are at the heart of the company’s work on robots. Boston Dynamics sees products derived from this work as the next step in the human history of building machines to reduce the danger, repetition and physically difficult aspects of work.
The first Levatas-powered inspection model being made available to Boston Dynamics customers is designed to detect and read analog gauges. Additional tools, available through Levatas’ Cognitive Inspection Platform, give customers the ability to autonomously detect and alert for unauthorized people, identify various forms of corrosion, notify employees of unsafe conditions like liquid spills, and detect unexpected changes to an environment.
“We are incredibly proud to work alongside Boston Dynamics, whose Spot robot represents the most sophisticated and capable option available for navigating challenging environments to automate inspections,” said Chris Nielsen, Founder and CEO of Levatas. “Pairing Spot’s incredible mobility with our Cognitive Inspection Platform gives customers the ability to automate inspection programs at an incredible scale.”
Chris Nielsen in industrial AI lab
In April this year, Levatas announced the opening of their new Industrial AI Lab. The lab allows operations and innovation teams the ability to rapidly explore the capabilities of our Cognitive Inspection Platform in real-time, both in-person and remotely. It also provides a dedicated space for our engineers to incubate, test, resolve issues discovered in the field, and even explore new ideas for the way robots and advanced AI can be used for automated inspection.
In a recent Levatas blog announcing the partnership, the company wrote, “But this was hardly an overnight success. It was in October 2019 when Levatas first recognized the immense potential of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot as the ideal platform to collect data in challenging environments; and, being a company that specializes in building computer vision models, data from hard-to-navigate places was what we needed. For this reason, each company seemed to complement each other extraordinarily well.
It was then that Spot became our firm’s lead platform for data collection and the automation of industrial inspections. Our team became laser focused on providing the Boston Dynamics robot the cognitive intelligence necessary to tackle the most demanding inspection tasks. Over the years that followed, our team set out to develop Industrial AI models specifically designed for Spot. Along the way, we made friends, delivered customer wins, broke things, fixed things, learned a ton, and probably had more Spot units operating at once than anyone else in the world. Cut to today, and we have created an entire platform of Industrial AI tools that can read analog gauges, identify thermal anomalies, listen for air and gas leaks, detect forms of corrosion, and even alert humans to any unexpected changes in their environments.”
Levatas has worked closely with Boston Dynamics’ sales and Spot development teams to help enterprise customers identify suitable use cases, set up the software, and integrate the technology into their existing systems and workflows. This new partnership designation reflects Levatas’ ability to assist joint customers in scaling these solutions.
“Our collaboration with Levatas has been instrumental in bringing advanced automation and inspection capabilities to our customers,” said Renee Burns, VP of Partnerships at Boston Dynamics. “Their capabilities align with ours, and their experience and track record helps our joint customers drive the value and impact they are looking for with robotic automation.”
The combined Levatas and Boston Dynamics solution is already significantly impacting industries such as manufacturing, electric utilities, oil and gas, and petrochemicals. Prominent customers utilizing this innovative solution include Anheuser-Busch InBev, Avangrid, BMW, and Global Foundries.