Visibility before exposure
Take a live switchgear room for example. Today, a qualified engineer may need to enter the room to assess its condition, often with limited information about what they will find inside. That expertise is essential, but it also means making critical decisions before the full picture is available.
This is what drives our interest in robotic inspection platforms. They have the potential to reduce direct human exposure while still providing the quality and depth of information needed to assess high-risk environments. More importantly, they offer something that service teams have rarely had before: visibility before exposure.
Robotic platforms can capture information such as thermal, acoustic and visual data from hard-to-reach locations. That information can help teams understand operating conditions, identify potential hazards and make more informed decisions before work begins.
This is not a distant future scenario. Suitable robotic platforms are already commercially available, and they are improving rapidly. The challenge is in adapting what already exists to suit the specialized requirements of electrical service work. That is where our research and development efforts are focused. We are combining service expertise, software development and engineering knowledge to build an application layer, so that robotic platforms can operate effectively in complex, safety-critical electrical environments, and integrate seamlessly with broader asset management systems.
Right now, much of this work remains at the prototype stage. We are not looking to adopt robots for their own sake. The objective is to understand how emerging technologies can be applied to solve real-world service challenges and create meaningful improvements in safety, efficiency and operational resilience.
From data to action
The value of automated inspection technologies ultimately comes from the insights they gather and actions they enable. Today, that means developing the capability to collect thermal imaging, acoustic monitoring and visual inspection data remotely, and analyze it far more quickly than traditional approaches allow.
AI has become a critical enabler. It helps transform large volumes of inspection data into actionable recommendations. That means service teams can identify potential issues earlier, prioritize their inspection activities effectively and prepare more thoroughly before work begins, having greater context and a clearer understanding of the condition of the assets they are inspecting. Far from replacing human expertise, these tools are helping to make sure that
decisions are informed by the richest and most precise information available.
Engineers stay in control
Conversations around introducing automation into the service industries quickly default to the question of replacing skilled workers. But it misses the direction of travel – particularly in electrical field service. Human judgment is irreplaceable because of the complexity of the environment and the stakes of every decision made.
Our ambition is to strengthen human capability, not to replace it. We will always need engineers to decide what should be inspected, interpret the findings and then recommend the best course of action. With automation, human expertise can be spared the noise and danger of repetitive, high-risk or difficult-to-access inspection tasks, while providing richer information from the outset.
Inspection technology should not be seen as a costcutting measure, either. It is more a way to help service teams achieve more with the same resources – arming them with better tools, better information and better support, all with the aim to help them perform their work both more safely and more effectively.
Human and technology integration will not be straightforward. Electrical environments are complex, safety-critical and highly specific. That is why the most promising innovations are often those that make existing expertise more effective. That said, adapting general-purpose technologies so that they become genuinely useful in a high voltage switchroom or a live substation will require sustained investment in research, software and digitalization. This is why we
MACHINERY, AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING 23