Martin Huus Bjerge, CEO of Rope Robotics, joined us to talk about their BR-8 robot that currently is capable of repairing leading edges of wind turbine blades. WATCH ON YOUTUBE HERE.



Rope Robotics got its start while Martin was working for Siemens Gamesa, and has since grown through various robot iterations and evolutions to the BR-8 model today, which has proven its technology in wet repair of turbine blade leading edges. Listen as he explains the origin of his company, how a great manager at Siemens helped incubate them in the early stages, and his vision for autonomous repair, wind technician jobs and collaboration within the industry. Check out their YouTube channel for more of the BR-8 robot in action.



This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 







Transcript EP58 - Martin Huus Bjerge from Rope Robotics



Dan: This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at weather guard, we make wind turbine lightning protection easy. If you're a wind farm operator, stop settling for damaged turbine blades and constant downtime. Get your uptime back with our strike table lightning protection system. Learn more in today's show notes or visit weather guard wind.com/strike tape.



Allen: Welcome back



Dan: I'm Allen Hall. I'm Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime 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. I'm your co-host Dan Blewett on today's show. We've got a great guest Martin Huus Bjerge from Rope Robotics is here. He is going to talk about his company, his technology, as they are outward, repairing leading edges of winter and blades all over the world.



So Allen really interesting discussion today with Martin. They are doing a lot of cool stuff with robotics, helping to get these leading edges cleaned up. Uh, what were some of your takeaways from today's talk?



Allen: Well, Martin and robotics have evolved the robot technology over the last couple, like yours to be very efficient at removing old leaning edge protection, and then cleaning the blade and applying a much more resilient, uh, leading edge erosion surface to two blades.



And that's taken several years of. Engineering time technology building two to come to the platform they have today. And that platform is really versatile. And I think that's the key to what rope robotics has done is that they have a technology that can be commanded from halfway around the world. Uh, so not only can I do the repairs and if I had all this data, it can also be commanded remotely.



So it's just an extremely versatile tool. And I think that's the part I pulled out from Martin was. How good this technology is because right now we're repairing leading edges with a tech group technicians. That's what we're doing. And it's sort of a manual process and, and, and Martins company is going to make it a lot more



Dan: automated.



Yeah. So in today's talk, you'll hear a lot about the, the actual sort of nuts and bolts, I guess, quite literally the, the technology in the robot itself, how it works, how they apply their solution, all that sort of stuff. Uh, also about how the company found was founded, which is really interesting. So they were sort of incubated, uh, by Siemens, uh, cause Martin was a, um, a long time employee of Siemens.



So he cut his teeth, learning about all the. All the ins and outs of a, of a big, uh, obviously wind energy company. And when he had this idea of brought to his management and they said, yeah, we actually support you. Um, you know, getting your company off the ground and, you know, doing some R and D and they were really, like I said,