Hibot Seals Partnership with Ebara Environmental Plant
Will facilitate commercial deployment of HiBot’s new “Squid” boiler inspection robot
Tokyo, May 28 - HiBot Corp., an innovative robotics start-up and pioneer of the RaaS (Robot as a Service) model for the inspection and maintenance of industrial infrastructure, announced today that it has entered into a new capital and business agreement with Ebara Environmental Plant Co., Ltd. (EEP). The partnership will allow HiBot to commence commercialization in 2021 of its new “Squid” robots; these are used in the inspection of boilers and incorporate submersible ultrasonic sensors that can detect flaws in their pipework. This development forms part of HiBot’s overall plan to expand deployment of its RaaS model in Japan and overseas.
EEP designs, constructs, operates and maintains solid waste treatment facilities. These feature boiler installations whose pipework is prone to corrosion and which must therefore be regularly inspected from inside. Conventional inspection methods are intensive and time-consuming, involving the cutting of pipework to allow the insertion of small sensors which measure its internal dimensions while being dragged through the system.
HiBot has collaborated with EEP with the aim of improving the efficiency of these inspections, adopting their robot technology to facilitate flexible monitoring inside small pipes. Its new “Squid” robots are inserted via the inspection ports of boiler tanks and driven towards the pipes needing inspection. Squid inserts submersible sensors into these to measure and record the internal pipe diameters. This reduces the volume of equipment needed for inspections, such as scaffolding, and makes the actual inspections shorter and much safer.
Squid robot used for measurement of water pipe thickness in boilers
Based on the success of field trials conducted in 2019, EEP and HiBot now plan to commercially deploy “Squid” in conjunction with HiBot’s AI data platform "HiBox" for the inspection and maintenance of boiler pipework in the more than 400 waste treatment plants operated by EEP in Japan and overseas.
Yoshio Watanabe, CEO of Ebara Environmental Plant, commented, “Leveraging this capital and business alliance with Hibot, we will actively collaborate in the RaaS domain by combining our extensive know-how in inspection and maintenance of waste-treatment plants with Hibot’s advanced technology. We plan to make use of RaaS solutions and similar cutting-edge technologies to help solve our customers' problems in a wide range of fields."As well as increasing the efficiency of plant inspection and maintenance work, the deployment of “Squid” and “HiBox” solutions will allow plant owners to predict the operating life of their infrastructure with a far greater degree of accuracy. This constitutes a key goal of HiBot’s strategy of providing RaaS-based solutions.