Allen and Joel talk to Laurent Zimmerli, Vice President of Customer Experience at Voliro. Voliro is a Swiss company that creates drones and robotics to transform the industrial inspection and maintenance processes. Their flagship "Voliro T" drone is designed for stable and controlled contact with surfaces, enabling efficient inspection of wind turbines including non-destructive testing and lightning protection system testing. Visit https://voliro.com/ for more!



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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Laurent Zimmerli, Vice President of Customer Experience at Voliro. And Voliro is a pioneering Swiss company applying drones and robotics to transform inspection and maintenance processes.



Founded in 2016 out of ETH Zurich's Autonomous Systems Lab, Voliro has quickly become a leader in industrial inspections and non destructive. Testing their flagship offering is the Voliro T drone known for its stability and reliability in confined spaces. Thanks to its omni directional control. We're all welcome to the program.



Laurent Zimmerli: Thanks Allen. Thanks for having me. It's great to be on the show today.



Joel Saxum: We had this conversation. Okay. We're fresh off of OMS and blades and people talking. Lightning protection has been. Huge. Everybody's talking about it. Lightning protectionist. Weather Guard lightning tech, that's what we do, right?



We're talking StrikeTape to people all the time. The first thing we ask them is, when was the last time you got your lightning protection systems tested? And a lot of times we get this glassy eyed look. Do we do that? They look at someone else and pull their phone out Do we do that? This is, this, and this is one of the reasons we want to talk to you.



We want to touch on Voliro and all of the offerings you guys offer, because I know you're working on NDT things. You're working on a lot of cool stuff, because you've solved a base root problem. So let's jump into that. The base root problem of flying drones and being in contact with surfaces.



Laurent Zimmerli: Yeah, that's exactly, that's actually how it started back in 2016 at ETH Zurich as a research project.



So we definitely didn't think about testing lightning protection systems of wind turn turbines back then, because it was mainly about what you just explained. It was how can we create a drone that can establish contact in a stable and controlled way with a surface or an object? If you're looking at a, like a conventional multi copter drone, whenever it moves sideways or forwards or backwards, the whole drone tilts in the direction of the movement.



That's basically how it works. The, like the back prop spin, spin harder and then it tilts and then it moves, which completely, which is the perfect way of moving. That's how a helicopter works as well, right? Now, if you're in motion it's not a problem in terms of stability because you're in motion.



However. If you want to push against the surface, or if you want to apply force against an object, the vehicle will not move. And if it tilts, it becomes unstable. And at some point, if you push too hard, it just basically falls over.



Joel Saxum: It'll flip over.



Laurent Zimmerli: Yeah, yeah. So basically the question back then is,