“Spot is a member of our maintenance team. The future is to have more Spots, so that we can improve on our inspections and improve our overall output as a company here at US5.”

Ryan Burns, Reliability Engineer

7

Inspection missions

~700

Assets inspected per mission

72

Work orders generated

TRANSCRIPT

Wayne Pender: We manufacture the future here at Michelin tire. And I don’t think you can get more in the future than a mobile robot.

My name is Wayne Pender. I’m the tech methods and reliability manager here at US5 in Lexington, South Carolina. We’re a passenger tire and light truck division of Michelin.

Ryan Burns: My name is Ryan Burns. I work in the reliability and methods department. We make sure that all the equipment is running, at its optimal conditions within the plant.

Pender: We’ve been using predictive tools here for quite some time. We do oil analysis, vibration analysis, infrared ultrasound—

Burns: Getting ahead of equipment failures is important, because it affects our production output. If we can predict a failure and we can plan and schedule the work to fix the issue before it becomes an unplanned breakdown, then we’re able to increase our output as a company and a tire producer.

The central team put out into the network, who wants to be the pilot site for Spot. As soon as we found out about this opportunity, we jumped on it.

Pender: We were like kids at Christmas, when we first got Spot and we couldn’t wait on the training, so we took it out of the box, powered it up and started walking it around. We went up and got our training and then Ryan started programming the missions the week we got back.

Burns: We started in the TV area, tire verification. I was familiar with that machinery because I started out as a technician in that area. I drove spot down there with the tablet and took it to the specific pieces of equipment, that I knew we currently inspected and areas that we also didn’t inspect, so that we can get ahead of any failures and we can try and detect anomalies ahead of time. Now, we have roughly 7 missions set up scanning about 350 scan points, that’s around 700 assets roughly.

The training at Boston Dynamics, one of the things that was very valuable was learning about Orbit and how Orbit worked. Orbit is basically, like the brain behind what’s happening with Spot. Orbit is Spot’s software that is on a server here on site, that we use to extract all the data and to analyze and sort through, and set up all the missions and set them on a schedule and give different users access to it.

Inside Orbit, you can see every single motor scan, and see how it’s performed over time. By being able to see that data, we can see what’s normal. And then from there, we’re able to say, we can set an alarm threshold at this point. So if the temperature of the motor extends beyond that, then it says, OK we’ve got a problem. So we to send a technician out to review it and verify that something’s going on. And then we can plan to repair that, to reduce our downtime and improve our production.

From a technician standpoint, Spot going out and doing these routes, eliminates a mundane tasks that the humans are doing. By Spot finding these anomalies and these issues, it gives the technician more time to go out and plan and schedule how they’re going to fix the problem versus going out, identifying, then trying to plan and schedule everything.

Pender: The bigger impact of the early findings, allow us time to plan these jobs and prepare for them versus an uncontrolled breakdown and a loss of production. We’ve created 72 work orders to date in the system using Spot.

Burns: From the missions that we have set up, Spot has gone out and has detected a few thermal issues with motors that were missing some fans on them. And so we were able to identify that and get that corrected. And then also we’ve detected 66 air leak work orders in the system, where we want to reduce our energy consumption.

Pender: We see Spot is the future. Hopefully, we have Spots in every North American facility, and a facility to size of US5, we probably, need a whole dog pound or multiple Spots here to actually, do what we need to do.

Burns: Moving forward with Spot, what we’d like to do is, we want to improve on our missions that we’ve already got with the Boston Dynamics team, have them come in and set up a mission within our boiler house. And then from there we’d like to continue the deployment process throughout the rest of the factory. Spot is a member of our maintenance team. The future is to have more Spots, so that we can improve on our inspections and improve our overall output as a company here at US5