Chris Cieslak, director and founder of BladeBUG, joined Allen and Dan to talk about his unique vision for robotic wind turbine repair. There are a handful of wind turbine maintenance, repair and inspection robots making a push toward ubiquity in the wind industry, but BladeBUG (follow them on linkedin here) has a design that is unique among all the others currently in use. The BladeBUG robot crawls using six independent legs--like an actual insect--with each leg utilizing its own vacuum system (video of it in action here) to remain stuck to the blade. Watch this episode on YouTube here.



In this episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, we dive into Chris' current iteration of his BladeBUG robot, the technology and unique capabilities of it, and his overall vision for wind turbine operations and maintenance. The wind industry is without a doubt moving toward automated and robotic maintenance whenever possible, and we were excited to get his input as a founder of a growing tech startup in the space.



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: EP60 - Chris Cieslak, Founder of BladeBUG, on Their Uniquely Capable Wind Turbine Maintenance Robot



0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A strike tape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today's podcast.



0:37Welcome back. 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.



0:57All right, welcome back to the uptime wind energy podcast. I'm your co host, Dan Blewett. On today's show, we've got a great guest, Chris Cieslak of BladeBUG is here. And I'm also joined by my co host Allen Hall. Allen, how are you sir? Hey, great, Dan. Boy, Chris, brings a lot of information to the table during this episode. And it's really interesting to hear all the robot technology that they've been working on over in the UK. Yeah, so Chris is the founder of bladebug and a former blade design engineer with with Festus and some others. And so he's got a lot of a lot of technical know how about, you know, winter and blade design. And so when they went out to create a robotic solution, you know, he decided that, you know, a vacuum independent leg moving honestly, kind of like a crawling critter. That's why they're called BladeBUG; BladeBUG was their solution. It's a really interesting technology. And they can do a lot of things that some of the other robotics companies won't be able to.



1:54So yeah, I mean, just hearing him go into depth about some of their solutions, and the technology and the redundancy. And just, there's a lot of interesting things that go into such a high tech prototype, it is a very difficult event they're trying to do, right. So they're going to try to go out on physical and a blade, particularly offshore, and do all kinds of either measurements or repair procedures on a blade. That's a very difficult problem to try to solve. But I think they've taken several years to develop this technology. And I think that's one of the benefits to where they're at today is that they spent all the hard work and time evolving to the space they're at now into the robot they have now because without spending those years in development, you don't have a really qualified robot, in my opinion,