Dainis Kruze from Aerones joined us to talk about their unique robotic technology that today is servicing, cleaning, repairing and inspecting wind turbines all over the world. Aerones' robots originated from their time at Y Combinator, working on drone technology that they later pivoted to working on robotics. In this fascinating talk, Dainis addresses the company's incubation in Y Combinator and lessons learned there, why they pivoted away from drones, how they tackle wind turbine maintenance problems, and how they're focused on solving problems in new, more time-efficient ways. Visit their YouTube channel here.







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EP42 - Dainis Kruze from Aerones on the Future of Wind Turbine Maintenance & Cleaning



Welcome back I'm Allen hall. I'm Dan Blewett and this is the up-time podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection, and ways to keep your wind turbines running.All right, welcome back to the uptime podcast. We've got a great guest today. Dainis Kruze is here from Aerones. Allen, what were some of your takeaways from our call with Dainis? Well, Dainis says bringing his robot technology. It's, it's not drone technologists, sort of a tethered robot technology, uh, to the world, uh, to do a variety of tasks that were.Typically done with, uh, people on ropes from, uh, measuring the lightning protection system, uh, resistance measurements to cleaning out drain holes, to, uh, repairing leading edges and detecting structural issue with blades, uh, his robotic platform and own. Robotic platform is doing, uh, astounding things and very quickly and efficiently.So it's just like a new frontier of robotic technology that they're bringing forward. Yeah. So without further ado, let's jump to our conversation with Dainis crews from Aerones.Yeah. So a first, first line of business here, and we were just talking about this off cameras. Uh, I really want to hear about your experience with going through Y Combinator. So as a, as a company and as a, I mean, all three of us are entrepreneurs in this conversation. Um, Y Combinator is, uh, is a, is a very wide, widely regarded, um, you know, startup incubator.So can you tell us a little bit about how your company got started, you know, with you and your co-founder and, um, how you've gotten to, uh, we're going to go all the way through your story in general, but tell us about the origins of Arizonans. Yeah. So me and the honest, we know each other since we were 18.Uh, so, uh, we were studying together physics and mathematics, computer science, and that's actually where we met and where we built our first startup. We were. We we built, uh, GPS devices, uh, and the platform, uh, we put the GPS devices on the wheels. So the owners of the wheels could see where the weak links are like for the companies basically business the business.So this is how we started, uh, and that company has actually grown, uh, to several other projects, IOT projects, uh, it's called intelligence systems. Uh it's it's it's yeah. Latin company. So, um, yeah, and like five years ago, Uh, is, uh, uh, exited the company and, uh, and, and like a year later came back and said, Hey, I have a new group.Great idea. Let's build a heavy lift drones. Uh, there are a lot of helicopters. There are planes, there are lots of small drones, but nothing in between. Let's let's build heavy withdrawns, which can do it. Some kind of a job. So it kind of started as a fashion and kind of, uh, we didn't have, you know, like, like the nice business stories where you see the problem and then you start to build the solution.We started to build these drones, uh, but. Uh, during the development. And, uh, we did a lot of different kinds of trials, like human rescue, firefighting, drones, um, and,