“The original idea for Roborigger came when I was speaking to a bloke building a wind farm off the coast of Aberdeen,” Mr Markwell said.
Roborigger in use at a George St, Sydney demolition site in 2019. Supplied
“He said his biggest problem was the lack of something that could hold blades steady so they could be attached to the hubs of offshore wind turbines, because once the wind got over 12 knots they had to shut down and that would cost them $300,000 per day.”
Mr Markwell also owns a supplier of equipment to the extractive industries called Tensa.
Once he returned to Perth, Mr Markwell began experimenting with a design using a gyroscope, but eventually settled on a unit that rotates using a flywheel, oriented by a wirelessly controlled thrusting fan.
The Roborigger is able to keep loads stabilised and stop them spinning at wind speeds of up to 15 knots, Mr Markwell said.
“The way it’s done otherwise is you have guys hanging off scaffolding hundreds of feet up, trying to catch a rope. Sure they are harnessed in, but it’s far from the best way of doing things,” he said.
The Roborigger unit is hooked on to a crane and then has the load suspended from it, and is said to take a worker two hours of training to control. It is currently available in three models with lifting capacities of 10, 15 and 20 tonnes respectively.
The West Perth factory was now also building a 30-tonne model, Mr Markwell said.
Derick Markwell is the founder behind Roborigger, a wireless system for stabilising crane loads without the need for dangerous human proximity. Supplied
Building projects on which it is currently being used include the Adelaide Casino, and a large car dumper that engineering outfit Monadelphous is constructing for a Fortescue mine in the Pilbara.
It was also used at a demolition site on the corner of George and King Street in the Sydney central business district last year, and Mr Markwell said loads were able to be lowered so accurately that only one lane of traffic needed to be closed instead of the usual two or three.
Development made possible by the external funding includes upcoming models that will add an artificially intelligent camera to the base, capable of detecting human movement.
A data collection and analysis add-on is also being developed, which Mr Markwell said would be able to give truck drivers notice that their load would shortly be required on-site for lifting, thus preventing backlogs.
Blackbird co-founder and partner Rick Baker said Roborigger had global potential - several of the trial agreements signed to date are from Japanese construction companies, where labour shortages have led to a push to automate construction sites as much as possible.
“It is a great example of using robots to make dangerous jobs safer. It has an opportunity to become the de facto standard for safe crane lifting around the world,” Mr Baker said.