Meet Your Robotic Coworkers

Engineers are already using inspection robots to identify hot spots on refinery exhausts, check boilers for metal loss and corrosion, and examine machinery without disassembling it. Yet, despite their sophisticated sensors and machine learning algorithms, few can do anything about a problem once they spot it. It still takes a human technician to maintain or repair a structure. This is beginning to change. A handful of inspection robots have begun to evolve into robots that can do maintenance tasks and even make the occasional repair on the spot. This special report delves deeper into how this will change the relationship between robots and workers.