In the early 1980’s, the Cargill Amsterdam Multiseed plant was the first building constructed on reclaimed wetlands that have since become a bustling industrial district. Four decades later, the vegetable oil factory is again breaking ground by using mobile robotics to modernize its facility, improve employee safety, and attract new talent as some workers approach retirement.

Since mid-2024, the plant has run a pilot project with Boston Dynamics’ agile mobile robot, Spot®, conducting routine maintenance inspections and visual safety checks in the facility’s oilseed crush and refinery plant. The pilot is part of Cargill’s “Plant of the Future” initiative, which seeks to develop autonomous factories where machines monitor themselves and employees focus on higher-value tasks, including predictive maintenance, continuous improvement, and planning.

“Our vision is to have autonomous plant operations where operators go from reactive work to more proactive work,” said plant manager Martin Blommestijn. “Seeds go in and refined sunflower oil comes out, but there are a lot of steps and monitoring to be done. All these checks are currently done by operators but could be done by a robot. Thanks to technologies like Spot, our operators can spend less time on routine tasks and more time on making tactical operational decisions.”

Global food leader

Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minn., Cargill provides food, agriculture, financial and industrial products and services to nourish the world in a safe, responsible, and sustainable way. Sitting at the heart of the supply chain, Cargill partners with farmers and customers to source, make and deliver products that are vital for living.

Amsterdam Multiseed is one of Cargill’s designated “lighthouse” factories, based on its pursuit of innovative, cost-efficient operations. The site has installed a biomass steam boiler that uses cocoa shells from a nearby Cargill chocolate factory as fuel. The boiler will cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90 percent.

From seeds to refined oil

Turning raw seeds into food-grade vegetable oil requires a gauntlet of machinery, from expeller presses to chain conveyors and centrifuges. The location includes two plants: one is a crush facility, and the other is a refinery. In the crushing plant, seeds are cleaned, hulled, and placed in presses that extract approximately two thirds of the seed oil. The leftover pulp, called press cake, then heads to extraction where it undergoes processing to extract the remaining oil.

Because the facility operates 24-hours a day, seven days a week, mechanical issues—including worn bearings, clogged heat exchangers, and gear boxes low on oil—can bring production to a standstill.

For example, if too much dust builds up during the cracking process, the dust can smolder, presenting a fire hazard. Cleaning crews work each weekday morning to mitigate the dust and grime, but hotspots are a constant concern.

“We have all sorts of big equipment, and if any of those fail, it takes time to get them working again,” said Wouter ter Wisscha, a reliability engineer. “We need preventive maintenance plans in place to make sure we don’t get any failures.”

Making a strong first impression

Cargill has a dedicated smart manufacturing team in Europe that looks for emerging digital technology to support its Factory of the Future vision. The team learned about Spot from a manufacturing manager who saw the robot in a Swiss museum in 2023 and initiated discussions about a potential pilot project at the factory in Amsterdam.

The following year, the smart manufacturing team arranged for Boston Dynamics to bring Spot to the refinery at Amsterdam Multiseed for a demonstration. Spot didn’t disappoint. Only a few minutes after powering up, Spot found an air leak on a centrifuge. It was an impressive debut.

“That was an extremely convincing showcase within two minutes of what Spot could do,” said Blommestijn.

Eager to run a longer term pilot, the Cargill team worked with Boston Dynamics to identify manual activities that Spot could handle.

“As a smart manufacturing group, we’re looking at bringing digital solutions to our sites to help enhance performance, reduce downtime, and also make the day-to-day work life of our operators and workers easier,” said Chris Kassios, Smart Manufacturing Product Owner for Digital Operations. “Before this project, we had minimal experience in robotics. We see Spot as being the ears and eyes of our operators—and maybe in the future, even the nose.”

“We can find problems because Spot makes inspections every day. We can then trace back to where the problem started. We would not be able to send people every day to measure temperatures, so it helps.”

Eline Tjeng, production supervisor

Setting missions in motion

Amsterdam Multiseed currently uses Spot’s standard sensor payload, which includes a thermal imaging camera, an acoustic sensor, and a PTZ high-resolution camera. Spot’s thermal camera measures surface temperature and can identify hot spots that could represent mechanical parts under stress. The acoustic sensor detects air and gas leaks, while the optical camera captures snapshots for visual safety checks.

The facility historically has relied on technicians scanning machines, one by one, using handheld thermal and acoustic detectors. The process is not only arduous and time-consuming, but technicians don’t have a systematic way of storing data from their handheld devices into a central database that the team can review.

In contrast, Spot sends data wirelessly to Boston Dynamics’ software platform Orbit, which operators can view from the facility’s central control room. Orbit offers a user-friendly interface that displays the current and historic status of the refinery with dynamic graphs and charts. This is critical for machinery that is prone to overheating.

“We can find problems because Spot makes inspections every day,” said Eline Tjeng, a production supervisor. “We can then trace back to where the problem started. We would not be able to send people every day to measure temperatures, so it helps.”

For ter Wisscha, Spot provides peace of mind when he has a small shift crew working at night. With Spot checking assets like clockwork, he can trust that when he arrives at the factory in the morning, he and his team can log into Orbit, see if Spot found anything of concern, and decide what issue to tackle first. While his team continues to conduct manual inspections in parallel with Spot, having the robot’s data at their fingertips is a giant leap forward in terms of awareness and prioritization.

“In the past, our maintenance team did the inspection just by walking through the factory and you don’t get any data from that,” said ter Wisscha. “Now that we have Spot, we have the data and we can compare it with last week’s or yesterday’s data. So Spot gives me more data and more insight regarding our assets within Cargill. I sleep better knowing Spot is working the night shift.”

Building the missions

Operators program Spot’s missions by manually driving the robot to specific inspection points within the facility. Using a multitouch tablet, technicians then assign an action for the robot to complete, such as taking a picture or reading a temperature gauge. This process continues until the technician has recorded and saved the entire mission. Once programmed, Spot will run Autowalks unaided using battery power.

To make way for cleaning crews working the first shift, Spot runs missions during the second and third weekday shifts, but operates all three shifts on the weekends when fewer employees are present. Spot needs only two hours to complete each mission.

“Here at Cargill, what we are really trying to do is to have our operators do problem-solving instead of manual tasks,” said robotics engineer Bálint Medgyesi. “We’re trying to automate these repetitive, manual tasks. Spot can do this every hour, always from the same distance, and always with the same quality data—and that’s key for us.”

Trending data

In addition to identifying anomalies, Spot’s steady stream of data can reveal mechanical issues over time that manual spot checks might miss. In one case, Spot’s temperature readings showed that bearings in a ventilation system were fluctuating between a normal temperature of 40°C (104°F) and up to 100°C (212°F) during the day.

Technicians increased the frequency of Spot’s scans and eventually realized the lubricant they had used was thickening during the day and becoming less effective. They needed to replace it with a different type of lubrication.

“We would not have found that issue without Spot,” said ter Wisscha. “In this case, because we did the constant measurements, we found out it was overheating at some point in the day. If the ventilator doesn’t get the oils out of the system, oil can stick to the machines and get hotter and the whole system could get clogged with oil.”

AI inspections

In addition to mechanical inspections, the pilot project is testing Orbit’s latest AI visual inspection feature. The update expands Spot’s abilities to provide safety checks, such as finding seed spills or emergency doors propped open.

“For Cargill, safety comes first, not only people’s safety, but also food safety,” said Kassios. “We want to avoid slipping hazards, tripping hazards, and any unsafe conditions in the plant. We are checking if doors are left open. We’re checking our 5S boards, our safety signs, and our fire extinguishers—whether they’re in place and working.”

The process begins with members of the smart manufacturing team and plant managers deciding what type of safety checks they would like Spot to conduct. Operators then program Spot to take pictures and answer a natural language prompt, such as “Is there a pile of debris here?” This extends Orbit’s AI capacity through Spot onto the factory floor.

“You locate what you’re trying to capture, you take a picture and then at the end you basically ask a question and this question could be a numerical one, a yes or no, or even an open-ended one,” said Medgyesi.

Aiding Spot’s vision is another new feature called Site View. Using a 360° panoramic camera, Spot generates panospheric images. Later, using Orbit, technicians can navigate through the images and review site conditions at different periods of time.

“Site View is a 360° plant view,” said Medgyesi. “We are currently using it to support our food and safety quality team by basically having another set of eyes in the plant. Spot walks this route multiple times a day and then you can identify leaks of seeds and oil early and you can also historically look back.”

Popular with colleagues

Spot has quickly endeared itself to the production staff. In fact, employees have taken to calling the robot “Rocky” in honor of a beloved employee who worked at Amsterdam Multiseed for over 40 years before retiring. Naming the robot after him was a natural way to recognize Amsterdam Multiseed’s legacy as it begins a new chapter of innovation.

“We invest in our people by buying these kinds of new technologies,” said Tjeng. “Collaborating with Boston Dynamics helps to show that even if we are a relatively old plant, 45 years plus, that we also invest to be there in the next 45 years. We care deeply about our employees, so we want to make their job easier. That’s what helps to attract new people, but also to keep our people, which is equally important.”