With the fast growth of the alternative energy market worldwide, it is not surprising that the industry is embracing the latest technologies to ensure increased productivity, efficiency, and safety.<\/p>\n
Alternative energy operations are typified by harsh environmental conditions, hazardous tasks, and remote locations, making the introduction of unmanned systems to inspect, secure, maintain, and repair a smart choice.<\/p>\n
From renewable energy wind farms to hydroelectric facilities, people often envision drones flying over these plants for security and inspection purposes.<\/p>\n
But one needs to think beyond the aerial drone and understand that there are also crawling robots, driving robots, cleaning robots, and even construction robots.<\/p>\n
All these Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are used today by the renewable energy industry.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) are incorporated into shore operations.<\/p>\n
Air, land, and sea autonomous platforms augment the quest for renewable fuel sources.<\/p>\n
These systems have complex payloads to carry out repetitive, redundant, and often dangerous tasks.<\/p>\n
These autonomous robots carry high-resolution and infrared cameras, live-stream video, sensors, and more that are expected to communicate dynamically.<\/p>\n
Additionally, navigation and collision avoidance must be maintained without disruption to keep all robotics moving.<\/p>\n
The greater the distance travelled by the autonomous platform and the physical obstacles encountered, the more critical it is that connectivity must not be disrupted.<\/p>\n
If a connection were interrupted, vital data could be lost, and the platform could be rendered immobile.<\/p>\n
Transmission of insights to central command is essential as is machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.<\/p>\n
So, how do robots wirelessly communicate with each other when they are often under harsh weather conditions and located in highly remote areas?<\/p>\n
Typically, alternative energy plants begin using cellular technology since long-term evolution (LTE) technology has sufficient bandwidth for most applications.<\/p>\n
Eventually, they discover coverage issues and dropped packets, because of blockage issues caused by wind turbines and the solar panels themselves.<\/p>\n
Next, they turn to traditional Wi-Fi and start to place fixed access points throughout the environment.<\/p>\n
Still, they discover more coverage issues and blockages, and it becomes cost-prohibitive to continue to add access points.<\/p>\n
Eventually, they realise they need to put the access nodes directly on the equipment itself, including the robots.<\/p>\n
Rajant\u2019s Kinetic Mesh overcomes these problems with wireless nodes called BreadCrumbs.<\/p>\n
Offered in an array of sizes and price points, BreadCrumbs can be affixed anywhere and to anything for constant connectivity.<\/p>\n
The BreadCrumbs also function on multiple frequencies to ensure the essential Wi-Fi connection.<\/p>\n
As the wind or solar farm becomes larger, or the number of unmanned systems is increased, so the Rajant network scales to meet the demand and remains just as reliable.<\/p>\n
Quick to deploy and easy to install, Rajant is integral to enabling robotics for the alternative energy sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are proud to be distributors of Rajant Kinetic Mesh solutions that help to meet the needs within this exciting and fast-growing industry,\u201d says Teresa Huysamen, Wireless Business Unit Executive at Duxbury Networking, local distributors of Rajant technology.<\/p>\n
For more information contact Duxbury Networking, +27 (0) 11 351 9800, info@duxnet.co.za<\/a>, www.duxbury.co.za<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Quick to deploy and easy to install, Rajant is integral to enabling robotics for the alternative energy sector.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":613639,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10459],"tags":[14323],"class_list":["post-613633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-news","tag-duxbury-networking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":613641,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613633\/revisions\/613641"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}