Autonomous Inspection of Thermal Exhaust Treatment Facilities

Executive
Summary

Merck, one of Europe's first adopters of Boston Dynamics Spot for industrial inspection, needed to replace manual monitoring of its maintenance-intensive thermal exhaust treatment facilities - environments that are physically demanding, frequently confined, and operationally critical.

By deploying Korial's autonomy platform with Spot, Merck demonstrated that a one-hour autonomous inspection route through a multi-storey facility - navigating industrial staircases, monitoring gauges, detecting thermal anomalies, and surveilling external pipe bridges - could be completed without human presence on site, supervised remotely over an encrypted 4G connection.

The pilot validated a scalable model for increasing the frequency, consistency, and quality of asset integrity monitoring across Merck's wider facility portfolio.

The Challenge

Routine Monitoring in Demanding, High-Stakes Environments

Thermal exhaust treatment facilities are essential to environmental protection - but keeping them properly monitored places a recurring physical burden on inspection teams operating in conditions that are confined, hot, and noisy.

The facilities house a range of maintenance-intensive components: pumps, fans, tanks, pipe bridges, and cooling systems, all of which require regular checks for pressure, fluid levels, temperature anomalies, and equipment defects. Inspectors historically carried sensors through these environments by hand, completing rounds that were consistent only insofar as individual personnel and conditions allowed.

At the frequency these facilities demand, manual inspection creates a compounding problem: the more often monitoring is required, the greater the exposure of personnel to uncomfortable and potentially hazardous conditions, and the harder it becomes to maintain the data quality and reproducibility that predictive maintenance programmes depend on.

The Solution

Supervised Autonomous Inspection with Korial and Spot

Merck selected Korial's autonomy platform - integrated with Boston Dynamics Spot - to automate inspection rounds at its thermal exhaust treatment facilities, removing the dependency on manual presence while substantially improving data consistency.

Korial equipped Spot with thermal and optical zoom cameras, onboard computing, and an encrypted 4G communication link, enabling the robot to execute fully autonomous inspection routes while transmitting live sensor data to operators via a web-based interface accessible from any internet-connected device.

During the pilot, Spot completed a comprehensive one-hour route through a multi-storey facility, autonomously navigating industrial stairs, walking over grating, scaling embankments, and routing around vehicles and obstacles without intervention. Throughout the mission, Spot read gauge displays directly - including cooling water levels and condensation indicators - zoomed in on distant instrumentation, monitored pipe bridges for anomalies, and used thermal imaging to identify wire defects and elevated pump temperatures.

Korial's platform handled the mission orchestration, data transmission, and operator interface, providing Merck's team with a reproducible, high-quality dataset from every run - the foundation for a predictive maintenance programme that improves in accuracy as inspection frequency and data volume increase.

The combination of Korial's control and autonomy software with Spot's physical capability - outstanding stair-climbing, terrain handling, and sensor integration — proved that challenging multi-environment inspection courses, encompassing both indoor and outdoor areas, can be executed reliably and at scale.