Technology
Computer Vision for Corrosion Detection: What the Model Learns to See
Detecting surface pitting before it progresses to structural risk requires more than standard object detection.
Engineering Notes
Technical writing on autonomous inspection, computer vision for infrastructure, and the practical challenges of building robots for industrial environments.
Technology
Navigating Underground Pipelines Without GPS: Dead-Reckoning and Visual Odometry
When GPS is unavailable, a robot needs a different way to know where it is.
Technology
Detecting Fatigue Cracks in Weld Seams: A Different Problem Than Surface Corrosion
Weld-seam fatigue cracks propagate differently from surface oxidation and require a different detection approach.
Industry
The Hidden Costs of Manual Transmission Tower Inspection That Never Appear on the Quote
The direct cost of a rope-access inspection team is visible. The costs of scheduling delays and coverage gaps are harder to quantify.
Technology
Sensor Fusion for Industrial NDT: Why a Single Sensor Is Never Enough
Non-destructive testing from a moving robot platform introduces noise and coverage gaps that no single sensor can handle alone.
Engineering
Designing a Robot Chassis That Climbs Transmission Lattice in Wind
A transmission tower inspection robot faces mechanical constraints that standard mobile robot design does not address.
Industry
Corrosion Under Insulation: The Pipeline Problem That Manual Inspection Misses Most Often
Corrosion that develops under insulation wrapping is among the most dangerous and underdetected failure modes in industrial pipeline systems.
Technology
Building a Training Dataset for Power Infrastructure Defect Detection
A detection model is only as good as its training data. Building a useful dataset requires decisions about annotation taxonomy and coverage of rare defect morphologies.
Technology
From Mine Shaft to Cloud: How Underground Inspection Data Gets Processed
A robot that inspects underground mine corridors cannot transmit data in real time. This post covers the edge-first data pipeline.
Company
Why Pittsburgh Is Where Industrial Robotics Companies Are Being Built
Pittsburgh has one of the deepest concentrations of robotics engineering talent in the world.
Company
Introducing Shifters AI: Autonomous Robots for Infrastructure Inspection
Shifters AI is building autonomous robots for the inspection environments that are hardest to reach and most critical to maintain.