[0:00] Ted Hill, ICONICS President and CEO
Michael Doak from the Power Business is going to be joining us next. He's based in Pittsburgh, and he's the Product Manager for something that's called Power I. Michael's brought new technology to the power industry for the last 20 years. Currently, he's using a leading an engineering team that's combining software engineering, computer vision, and mechanical and electrical engineering. And they're developing a state of the art computer vision and machine learning platform that moves. They call it Power I. Michael, thanks for joining us.
[0:47] Michael Doak, Power I Product Line Manager for Mitsubishi Power Electric
Thanks, Ted. I'm excited to be here with ICONICS today at Connect 2021. My name is Michael Doak, and I'm the Product Manager at Mitsubishi Electric Power products where I'm in charge of developing a state of the art software platform named Power I. Thank you for allowing me to crash the ICONICS Connect conference for a few minutes to introduce you to Meppi and the Power I product. Meppi is a sister company to ICONICS based in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, about 30 minutes north of Pittsburgh. We primarily serve the North American electrical utility market as a manufacturer of high voltage and medium voltage circuit breakers, power transformers, turnkey electrical substations, and power electronics, and electricity transmission technologies. We have been around since the late 1980s and have grown to offer products in almost all aspects of electric utility from generation to transmission to distribution and consumption. Our equipment enables the backbone are the power grid to operate ensure that our electric utilities customers enable you as consumers to be able to turn the light every time you tell Alexa to turn the light because we manually flipped light switches anymore, right? Alexa, turn on the light. It allows you to watch Netflix every time you turn on the TV. It allows you to charge your electric vehicle regardless of where power is actually coming from, be it traditional generation or renewable energy sources. You can trust the Mitsubishi Electric equipment to be the highest quality products with the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry. Even though the products we sell are critical to everyone's daily lives, Meppi as all companies is, is innovating and bringing new technologies to the market. Power I was conceived from revision two years ago to develop an advanced analytics platform based on computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for the utility industry to perform autonomous inspections and condition based maintenance of critical electrical facilities. Power I also provides real time visual intelligence, increased facility security, and provides enhanced employee safety by allowing robots to perform the work required in hazardous environments. Power I takes image data, thermal data, and acoustic data from a variety of sensor platforms and creates actionable alerts through the Power IQ I engine. Power I enables autonomous patrol definitions and scheduling, including smart scheduling when an anomaly is discovered. Automatic asset baseline patrolling when a new asset is added to the system, and emergency patrols scheduling when the system identifies external emergencies, such as natural disasters.
[3:41]
In many of our customer facilities, communications can be a challenge due to the remote locations of each facility. We offer support for traditional network communications, cellular communications, and also new satellite communication technologies. We introduced Power I utilizing fixed cameras, and incorporated Pan and Tilt cameras, and now we are excited to be partnering with Boston Dynamics to bring what may be the coolest commercial product currently on the market to our Power I platform. The Spot quadruped robot allows us to gather data from the ground in real time from any vantage point that we need. It allows us to form Power I’s computer vision models more completely and allows utilities to dispatch a robot remotely to any asset within a facility to gather more intelligence about the health of that asset, or the wellbeing of that facility, all without the need to roll a truck. Spot already has an amazing lineup of sensor platforms available from both Boston Dynamics and its partners. The ability for the robot to gather true ground based data that can be analyzed with artificial intelligence like included in the Power I and the ICONICS software platforms, make it like no other mobile platform. The robot lasts between 70 to 90 minutes on a single charge, and it can return back to his docking station to recharge before running another autonomous mission. Here's a quick video showing the robot undocking walking away and then returning to the dock, all being done autonomously.
[5:52]
I don't know about you, but to me, that is pretty cool. Finally, as you can see, Spot is able to traverse rough terrain such as gravel, grass, and hills. It can traverse steps and scale obstacles up to 12 inches in height. It is truly a remarkable piece of technology that allows software developers to become more creative in providing solutions to customers by solving the hard problems that allow innovative solutions like Power I. Here's one last short video of Spot actually performing an inspection in an electrified substation.
[6:43]
So, in closing, when you flip that light switch on, or tell Alexa to do it for you, it is really cool to know that somewhere in the power grid, a piece of Mitsubishi Electric equipment or an innovative software platform developed by Mitsubishi Electric is providing that critical function to your daily lives. We are excited to have ICONICS as part of the Mitsubishi Electric family, and hope that you have a better understanding of the depth of innovation and breadth of experience that ICONICS now has access to as part of the Mitsubishi Electric family. I hope everybody has a wonderful Connect 2021 conference. Thank you stay safe and have a great day.
[7:22] Ted Hill
Michael, thank you that was sort of an interesting mix of fascinating and sort of creepy at the same time. My daughter's bike got stolen from her house that she lives in at college, and I can't imagine if we didn't have one of those robots patrolling the street that her bike would still be there. Thank you again, Michael.