GE Renewable Energy has picked two UK companies to develop and demonstrate robotics technology for inspecting offshore wind turbines.

Eleven-I and Innvotek have both successfully applied to a robotics innovation call, the latest in a series of challenge competitions through GE Renewable Energy and the UK’s Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, a technology innovation centre.

Derbyshire-based Eleven-I, which provides instrumentation hardware, software and data analysis technologies, is to develop its blade monitoring and analysis system used to monitor blade health throughout its lifetime, from post-manufacture and transportation through to operation.

“We’re very excited to make a real contribution by reducing dependency on manual inspections and increased adoption of autonomous asset monitoring,” said Bill Slatter, CEO of Eleven-I.

Innvotek, a Cambridge-based technology innovation consultancy, is to develop further a robotic crawler, equipped with bolt inspection capability and a tightening tool for generator maintenance.

“Our goal is to provide innovations to support the continued growth of offshore wind energy,” said Michael Corsar, CTO of Innvotek. “This programme is enormously valuable as it provides a unique partnership and in-depth expertise to boost the development of our robotic technology for offshore wind.”

Both companies will receive technical support, guidance and demonstration opportunities with GE Renewable Energy and ORE Catapult.

“We believe that robotics such as presented by Eleven-I and Innvotek have the ability to significantly reduce operations and maintenance costs for offshore wind turbines like the Haliade-X,” said Anthony Gordon, senior product manager at GE Renewable Energy. “We are looking forward to seeing their innovation demonstrations.”

This follows two previous UK innovation challenge winners announced in November last year, Tethys and Aerones, which focused on developing blade maintenance technology for GE.

The development of robotics technology is seen as vital for the offshore wind sector, which, according to ORE Catapult research, could cut its inspection costs by almost 40% through integrating remote operations, robotics and automated systems into operations and maintenance activities. The UK’s Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) is supporting the programme.

Graham Smith, programme manager at ORE Catapult, said: “The second robotics challenge within the four-year Stay Ashore research collaboration between GE and ORE Catapult received many applications from strong UK companies, and together with KTN and GE we are very pleased to be able to provide opportunities for these companies to access the fast-growing offshore renewables sector by delivering value with cutting edge technical innovation.”