"Robots to the Rescue: Safer, Smarter, Speedier Quality and Inspection Processes" - 8-11 July, Newcastle Racecourse

“Robots to the Rescue: Safer, Smarter, Speedier Quality and Inspection Processes” – 8-11 July, Newcastle Racecourse

The National Robotarium is excited to participate in the 2024 NWG (Northumbrian Water Group) Innovation Festival!

As Gold sponsors of the event, now in its eighth year, the team will deliver a number of different activities over the week including leading a design sprint exploring the use of robotics to improve the safety and efficiency of water and wastewater inspections.

About the sprint

Water and wastewater service providers face significant operational and safety challenges associated to quality and inspection processes throughout the asset lifecycle which are labour intensive. For example, final inspection of assets such as water mains and buried assets can be challenging due to their location and high risk from a health and safety perspective.

The combination of safety risks, operational inefficiencies, and regulatory pressures calls for innovative solutions that enhance safety, reduce downtime, ensure compliance, and reduce manual labour for new and existing assets. We understand there is potentially technology available which can conduct elements of the above inspections and quality assurance examples; however, we think there is opportunity to merge technology – the question is how?

Due to the upscaling demand in AMP8 to increase our level of investments three-fold, the aim of the sprint is to understand what robotic technology is being used across industry and how we can adopt/ adapt technology in the short term and long term to assist with the AMP8 challenge (THINK SPEED AND SCALE!).