The video titled “Spot at AB InBev Belgium | Boston Dynamics” showcases how Spot, the robot dog developed by Boston Dynamics, is being utilized at the AB InBev brewery in Belgium as part of the “Brewery of the Future” program. The brewery, the largest in Europe, covers 30 soccer fields and produces 10 million hectoliters of beer, including popular brands like Stella Artois, Budweiser, and Corona. The goal of the program is to become carbon neutral by 2028, and Spot is playing a crucial role in achieving this by helping to understand and reduce energy consumption and losses in the facility.
Spot runs daily missions on the packaging lines and in the CO2 plant, conducting thermal and acoustic anomaly inspections to identify potential equipment faults or issues before they cause downtime. The use of Spot has led to more than double the expected number of anomalies discovered, leading to improved performance, reduced energy consumption, and faster repair times. The brewery sees endless opportunities for utilizing Spot in various departments and for safety interventions.
The deployment of Spot at the AB InBev brewery exemplifies the innovative use of robotics and technology in the brewing industry, showcasing the potential for improved efficiency, reliability, and sustainability.
Watch the video by Boston Dynamics
Author Video Description
A key part of AB InBev’s “Brewery of the Future” program, Spot conducts 1,800 individual inspections each week across ten packaging lines that churn over 50,000 containers of Stella Artois, Budweiser, and Corona beer every hour. In the first six months of deployment, Spot discovered nearly 150 anomalies and slashed average repair times from a few months to 13 days.
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Video Transcript
We’re actually here in the Cradle of stalak this is where it all started for the for the company we are gathered here in the biggest Brewery uh of Europe and this is uh the home of St we cover in total 30 soccer fields we can go up to 10 million hect liters of of capacity St one of the brands we grew here but we BW also bwe and Corona we have the ambition to become carbon neutral in 2028 to go there we need to better understand our consumption points of electricity of gas of steam of pressurized air and so on uh and spot can help to understand better the data of consumption but also the losses we Face actually in our
Prate here in Len I’m responsible for running the brewery a future program program of which spot is one of our key initiatives we learned about spot through our colleagues in the North America Zone in our carsville Brewery they were already running a pilot and we saw the amazing results that they were
Seeing in their facility so we decided to do a Pilots here in Len Also the reac in the begin people don’t look at spots like it’s really a robot or a machine for us uh in Brewery it’s our dog it’s a colag deployment of spots went very quickly uh we had great support from Boston Dynamics on recording missions and really showing us best practices on
How to record the mission very very quickly spot runs his missions on all of our 10 packaging Lines within luren and we’ve also recorded some missions in our CO2 plant the missions run daily and is able to run fully autonomously with no Interaction we do two types of inspections with spot one is a thermal image uh anomaly detection and the other is using the fluke sensor to look at Acoustic anomalies so the thermal uh inspections are really looking at if any of the pumps Motors and gearboxes are starting to overheat or hit a certain Threshold the reason why we do acoustic sensor anomaly checks is because we have a lot of pipe works and valves within the brewery and it’s only normally when we have a full complete shutdown of the line that we’re able to hear these leaks but with the fluke sensor and with spot
Doing his autonomous missions we’re able to keep the lines running packaging L the advantage with using spot is that we’re able to continuously and accurately reproduce the same measurements and keep reproducing those results day in day out so whenever you ask spot to go and run its Mission it will do its
Mission exactly how you programmed it without any deviation we currently have pumps Motors gearboxes conveyors and we’re looking to use spot to identify uh any potential anomalies on these pieces of equipment before they happen that was good we’re looking to uh improve the reliability of our packaging lines we’re
Looking to do more preventative maintenance on our packaging lines we’re looking to reduce downtime that we see on our packaging Lines by identifying potential faults or issues on the lines before they actually happen normally when you have a period of downtime the line comes to a halt or
The performance of the line starts to slow down so with spot we’re looking to identify pieces of equipment which would uh eventually come to a halt or break down which would then cause the downtime on the line when spot completes its Mission um the technician will review the activity
Log of spot uh Within appc um whenever the inspection point is out of Tolerance um there is a flag and the technician will verify the nature of the anomaly after the anomaly has been verified the technician will enter the anomaly into the maintenance system so a workorder notification is raised spot
For us at SP has exceeded expectations it is seeing more than double the anomalies we were expecting but we’re also now able to fix and really see the performance increases and energy reduction within the brewery but this is not where we will stop or want to stop the opportunities
Are endless actually in this Brewery we have the Brewing Department we have the utilities department we have the water treatment you can use spots for safety interventions the solutions that spot can deliver potentially is is Endless
Video “Spot at AB InBev Belgium | Boston Dynamics” was uploaded on 01/10/2024 to Youtube Channel Boston Dynamics