The Robot Data
Problem, Solved
Pave the path to automation
with Industrial DataOps

The Robot Data
Problem, Solved
Pave the path to automation
with Industrial DataOps

Table of contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................................... pg. 3
Robots in industry............................................................................................................................. pg. 4
Why robots?................................................................................................................................ pg. 4
Cognite Data Fusion® and robotics................................................................................................. pg. 5
Cognite Data Fusion® in action........................................................................................................ pg. 9
Cutting emissions in the power and utilities industry............................................................. pg. 10
Monitoring everything at industrial sites................................................................................. pg. 11
Lowering the barrier to smart 3D modeling.............................................................................. pg. 12
Conclusion......................................................................................................................................... pg. 13

About Cognite©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

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Cognite is a global industrial SaaS company that
supports the full-scale digital transformation ofasset-heavy industries around the world. Our core
Industrial DataOps platform, Cognite Data Fusion®,enables data and domain users to collaborate toquickly and safely develop, operationalize, andscale industrial AI solutions and applications.
Cognite Data Fusion® codifies industrial domain
knowledge into software that fits into your existing
ecosystem and enables scale from proofs ofconcepts to truly data-driven operations to deliver
both profitability and sustainability.
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Introduction
Many tasks in industry are perfect for robots. They
are repetitive and boring, located in hazardous orremote environments, and require a great deal of
manual data collection.
Unfortunately, robots haven’t been perfect for industry. Until now.

erations (DataOps) can help industrial companies
take an important step toward an autonomous
future.
Solve the robot data problem and pave the path
to automation with Cognite Data Fusion® , theleading Industrial DataOps platform.

The development of robotics systems has reacheda tipping point. Robots today are capable and secure enough to work in industrial settings, and affordable to the point where the economics of automating certain workflows make sense.
This development couldn’t have come at a better
time. Asset-heavy industries such as oil and gas,
power and utilities, and manufacturing are facing
growing pressure to produce more to meet theworld’s growing demands for energy and goods,
yet cut costs, emissions, and waste.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

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Hardware alone isn’t enough to meet these challenges. To incorporate robots into their digitaltransformation strategies, industrial companies
need software that collects the valuable data
gathered by robots, processes it, and makes insights available to all data consumers, from control room operators and field workers to data scientists and solution engineers.
The combination of robots and industrial data opWHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Robots in industry

There’s no replacement for human ingenuity. That’s
why our creativity and problem solving should bereserved for tasks that require these skills.

For everything else, there’s robots. Here’s why:
■ Keep people out of harm’s way. Heavy machinery, dizzying heights, explosive gases—industrialsites can be dangerous places to work. But not
for robots. For remote, high-risk, or restrictedsites, robots can be the eyes and ears for humanoperators, transmitting high-quality audio andvideo with millisecond latency.
■ Cut costs, emissions, and waste. Remotely
managing assets and plants through on-site
robots means fewer people living offshore ortraveling to remote power stations, to mention
just two examples. This translates to lower CO2
emissions and downtime related to transportation, and less wear and tear on vehicles, helicopters, and other equipment.
■ Automate routine tasks. Robots can follow a
fixed route every day at the same exact time,reading gauges and monitoring known issues
such as corrosion, leaks, and noise. They don’t
need rest, they can work around the clock, andWHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →the more data they collect, the more the process
can be improved.
■ Detect slow changes. Humans get used to gradual changes. Robots don’t. By reviewing high-resolution images captured by robots during
inspection rounds, operators can answer questions such as: Was this wet spot here yesterday?
How fast is this corrosion developing? For how
long has that crack been there?
■ Remember the data. Handwritten notes can get
lost, and people sometimes forget what theysaw. Robots can collect all the inspection data
they generate in a single location, where it canbe used to power applications and models that
improve operations and maintenance processes.

These examples are just some of the benefits thatrobots bring to industrial operations. Without theright industrial software, however, a robot is justanother siloed system.
4

Robots can help. Robots can complement existing systems and human expertise, monitor known
problem areas, and detect new situations before
they become a risk to safety and operations.

Why robots?

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) play a critical role in
the operations and monitoring of ventilation, heating, and other important functions at industrialsites. However, many issues related to corrosion,leaks, and noise aren’t detected and monitored bysystems, but by field workers who come across theissues by chance during inspection work.

Cognite Data Fusion® and robotics
Processing

Sharing insights

Mission execution

Predictive maintenanceInspection planning

To incorporate robots into their digital transformation strategies, industrial companies need software that solves the data problem—collecting andconnecting the valuable data gathered by robots,
contextualizing it with other existing data from IT,
OT, and ET systems, and making the data available
and understandable to all data consumers, fromcontrol room operators and field workers to data
scientists and solution engineers.
The way to do that is via the digital twin.

delivering real-time insights, accurate forecasting, and intelligent decision-making. Together, thiscreates a robust foundation for automation anduse of robots.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

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Data collection

Cognite Data Fusion® helps industrial companies
build operational digital twins of physical assets,
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →6©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

An operational digital twin is the aggregation of all possible data types and data sets,
both historical and real-time, directly or indirectly related to a given physical asset or setof assets in a single, unified location. The
collected data must be clean and contextualized, linked in a way that mirrors how things
are or would be linked in the real world, andmade consumable depending on the use case.

Cognite Data Fusion® enables robots to navigate
industrial facilities based on data in the digital twin.
This close connection between hardware and software adds human-like meaning and association
to the thousands of images, sensor readings, andother data that fill key gaps by providing:■ Two-way context to both the robots and theoperators, enabling robots to construct, view,
and add to the digital operating environment,
while converting data into information that canmore easily be interpreted by humans. With afully contextualized digital twin composed ofimages, scans, sensor data, and more, robots
not only have visual access to the environment
but all additional data and metadata pertaining
to their surroundings.
■ Fluid handoffs between subprocesses so thatdata and even some decisions can be exchanged
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →data capture, and automatic report generation.

In 2020, Cognite and Aker BP, one of the largest
independent oil companies in Europe, partnered
to deploy Spot, the quadruped robot developed
by Boston Dynamics, to pioneer remote-controlled offshore missions on the Skarv installation,a floating production, storage, and offloading(FPSO) unit located 210 kilometers offshore in
the North Sea.

The mobility of Spot offshore, and the communication between Spot, Cognite Data Fusion® ,and Aker BP were both verified and tested. Data
from Spot was available and sorted in Cognite
Data Fusion® in milliseconds, and Spot was
remote-controlled from a home office onshore,demonstrating the synergies between robots
and digital twins.

Cognite Data Fusion® served as the data infrastructure for the offshore test, which collected
images, scans, and sensor readings from robotics systems and then shared the data across Aker
BP via a dashboard to make it actionable. Tasks
included autonomous inspection, high-quality

The deployment was an important step toward
greater use of robots in the oil and gas industry, demonstrating how remote operations withrobots can make offshore operations safer, more
efficient, and more sustainable.

from the original point of analysis to the commissioning of a work order without losing quality or
integrity. This minimizes error and inconsistencies in what is a manually demanding processthat often leaves inspection data under-analyzed. With this barrier lessened or removed,
operations and analytics teams can shift theirefforts away from data overhead and toward
valuable decision-making.
■ Connection to broader digital infrastructure sothat inspection data can be reused across theorganization for other analysis, including planning, reporting, prediction, and optimization. This

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →connection can also be used to trigger inspections. For example, if a system detects a pressure anomaly in a pump, Cognite Data Fusion®
can send a robot to the pump to provide audio
and visuals to support troubleshooting.
By using these pillars, this contextualized operating environment becomes the true driver ofsustainable automation for robot- and dronebased inspections because it exists as a living
entity.

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Industrial DataOps, as a component of digital twins,
unlocks data from individual silos and contributes to an open ecosystem of interoperable data
and analytics technologies. By using this open
approach, more data consumers are empoweredwith more data, and innovation can thrive.

Spot goes offshore©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

The digital twin bridges the gap between the physical and the digital world. It brings data from aroundthe organization—whether it’s operational data,
CRM data, or planning data—into a centralized location to provide context, understanding, and action
to assets, sites, and processes.

It can be updated daily, or even hourly, with newimages taken from exactly the same viewpoints; it
can be contextualized with live operational datafrom across the organization, and it can be leveraged for decision-making applications and workorder automation. It also facilitates scale, making it
easy to scale to other sites, payloads, and missions
without significant system redesign or other major
overhead.

With Cognite Data Fusion®, the business case for solving digitalization use cases
becomes profitable.

Decrease cost needed tosolve a use case by making
it 10 times faster to buildand deploy data sciencemodels or apps.

Increase the value of ause case by 100 times byscaling a solution to a fleetof assets automatically.

Cognite Data Fusion®
makes it profitable
to invest in digitalization
Without CDF®
Without CDF®
With CDF®
With CDF®

COST

VALUE

To:

Go check the status of every pump…

Go check the status of every pump...
...from a certain manufacturer…
+ Installed base records...with RPMs above 10,000…
+ Operational data...that have not been inspected in the last month.
+ Work order history

Learn more about Cognite Data Fusion®

WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →→©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

From:

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Expand the scope of autonomous missions with Cognite Data Fusion®

Cognite Data Fusion® in action

Telepresence:

3D scanning:

Maintenance planning

Robots can be the eyes and ears for human operators at remote, high-risk, or restricted sites.

Robots can make daily 3D scans of industrial sites,
keeping 3D models up to date and trustworthy forremote operations.

Robots can give real-time and accurate informationneeded for high-quality maintenance planning froma remote location.

Benefits: Updated information, better decision-making.

Benefits: Automatically generated and eventdriven work orders.

Benefits: Safer operations, reduced personnel
costs.

Asset tracking:

Robots can replace operators during inspections
rounds, night shifts, and other repetitive tasks.

Robots can keep track of movable assets suchas containers, barrels, materials, trucks, lifts, andmore—and make every physical object on site
searchable.

Benefits: Reduced costs and more time for in-depthtasks.

Benefits: Reduced costs and risk in building projects.

WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

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Autonomous inspection:

That’s why the power and utility industry is exploring the use of robotics. By incorporating robots into
inspection workflows for remote sites, grid operators would be able to reduce their climate gas emissions, ensure higher uptime through data-driven
maintenance, and keep people out of harm's way.
Solution: Cognite worked with a major national
grid operator to explore how the combination of
Cognite Data Fusion® and robots such as Boston
Dynamics’ Spot can minimize the need to travel toremote, unmanned locations in the power and utilities industry.
The grid operator’s experts put Spot to use at oneof its indoor substations. By ingesting images,
sensor readings, and other data collected by the
robot into Cognite Data Fusion® , the grid operator was able to deploy daily autonomous inspection missions, generate 3D models, and create an
operational digital twin of the facility—all in just twodays. The solution easily scales across assets andlocations.
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →house gas that is used to insulate electrical equipment. An analysis shows that using cameras—for
example mounted on robots—is a cost-effective
way of remotely reading analog gauges and monitoring SF6 gas levels at its facilities, which will help
the grid operator reach its emissions target.

Impact: The combination of hardware and Cognite
Data Fusion® enables any system or any person
to navigate a robot from anywhere in the world
to collect data. The data is then automaticallyconverted to actionable information and contextualized to the operational digital twin.
The grid operator’s robotics project highlights thepotential of robots in the power and utilities industry. After a quick tutorial, anyone in the organization can remotely operate any robot, outdoors,indoors, on the ground, and in the air. This reducestime, costs, and emissions associated with inspections and maintenance work in remote locations. It
also makes better use of subject-matter experts.
Without having to travel long distances to perform
inspections, the grid operator’s experts can bein multiple locations in one day, easily comparing
between sites and performing more in-depth analyses.
The grid operator has set an ambitious goal of
cutting its climate gas emissions by 25% by 2025.
This includes sulfur hexafluoride, a potent green-

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →10

Challenge: In the power and utilities industry,
manual inspections and maintenance performedin remote locations by humans can get time-consuming and expensive. Additionally, trips to remotelocations comprise a significant part of grid operators’ climate gas emissions.

In addition to planned inspection missions, the grid
operator also tested how robots perform in unexpected situations that require immediate attention,for example if a sensor at a remote, unmanned facility detects a gas leak. Using software developed by
Cognite in combination with ground-based robots
and a flying drone, employees were able to inspect
three different assets at three different locations
while working from home.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

Robots and Industrial DataOps: cutting
emissions in the power and utilities industry

This lack of oversight means yard operators often
have a limited understanding of how items are used
and whether there is room for optimization. Smarter
tracking of construction materials and tools would
help yard operators keep track of inventory, potentially helping them reduce costs and the chance ofdelays.
Solution: Cognite worked with an engineering
company that provides integrated solutions, products, and services to the global energy industry
to create a digital twin of one of the company’s
173-acre construction yards. The digital twin
enables a number of different use cases, including
an overview of where vehicles, equipment, materials, and other individual assets are located at any
time.
To create the overview of the construction yard,
Cognite and the engineering company combined
three main components in Cognite Data Fusion® :scans taken by a flying drone for a bird’s-eye viewof the site, instrumented assets such as forklifts
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →Impact: The digital twin creates a virtual representation of the physical reality at the construction
yard, providing regularly updated location information about key items and enabling users to quickly
locate what they need.
An independent consulting firm has estimated thatmaintaining an overview of all assets, tools, andequipment used in a typical topside project generates about $.27 per pound in savings. For large projects, this adds up to millions of dollars in savings.
Data collection via robots and other devices keeps
the information in the digital twin current without
increasing the workload of employees at the yard.
With up-to-date information about materials, vehicles, equipment, and more at their fingertips, all
3,000 employees at the site can make data-driven
operational decisions that reduce costs and risk
in building projects, for example improving logistics with vehicle tracking and using drone scansfor precise measurements of the yard.

BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →11

Challenge: Construction yards are vast, dynamic
environments where the occupancy changes
every day due to the tools, vehicles, equipment,
and materials that are used as part of the construction process. These items often disappear and leadto project delays and increased costs, as the items
have to be replaced.

equipped with GPS sensors, and data gathered
regularly by robots using cameras that capture
360-degree images. The data was then turned into
coordinates and presented to users in a graphic
interface that resembles Google Maps. Using
computer vision, the engineering company can
now track individual assets at the yard.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

Robots and Industrial DataOps: monitoring everything at industrial sites

Robots and Industrial DataOps:
lowering the barrier to smart 3Dmodeling
Challenge: Locating technical rooms andsensors in commercial buildings and industrial
installations can be difficult due to thecomplexity of these sites and the sheer numberof rooms and sensors that need to be checkedon a regular basis. This means crews conducting
maintenance, inspection, and other tasks often
spend a considerable amount of time locating
individual sensors before they can begin the task
they were assigned to complete.
Physical floor plans can help crews navigate buildings, but the plans can be unwieldy or difficult tointerpret and may become outdated over time. Digitalizing the process of locating sensors would help
technicians, custodians, and operators find thedata they need faster, reducing operational costs
and the time needed to identify and correct issues.

filter information by moving around in the 3D model.
Images for the 3D models can be captured manually, but robots can perform the task more efficiently
and as part of regularly scheduled inspection
rounds. The images, as well as the sensor data, areingested into Cognite Data Fusion® , and Cognite’s
web viewer SDK, REVEAL, easily integrates the
3D model into any web-based application. This
makes the data available on computers and mobile
devices, enabling experts to quickly look up information.
Impact: Photorealistic 3D models of technicalrooms combined with live sensor data help technicians, custodians, and operators perform tasks
more efficiently and independently, which reduces
operational costs and potentially increases thequality of their work. Additionally, offloading thetask of collecting images to robots both frees
up time for employees and keeps the 3D models
continuously updated.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

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Unfortunately, the time and effort required to manually digitalize the process represent major barriers.
With robots, however, inspection and maintenancecrews can efficiently collect the data they need tobuild and maintain high-quality 3D models.
Solution: Cognite worked with a solution provider
for HVAC systems in commercial buildings to create
photorealistic 3D models of technical rooms, where
live sensor data is overlaid on the sensor’s placement in real life. The 3D model enables users to
WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Conclusion
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here, promisingenormous transformation. This transformation will
be powered by data.
Industrial workers will play a major role in shaping the future of industry. To succeed, they needaccess to the best tools and the best data.
Robots can help industrial workers be in moreplaces at once, track more changes over time, anduse more data in their decision-making processes.
This will require software that gets data to experts
in a form they can understand and act on.
Industrial DataOps provides a new, more contextualized way for industry to consume data and accelerate digitalization. It puts humans over tools andprocesses, working analytics over comprehensive
documentation, and experimentation, iteration,and feedback over extensive upfront design.

©COGNITE 2023 — COGNITE.COM

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For robots, Industrial DataOps takes automationfrom concept to scale, creating an interoperable ecosystem of robots, drones, data, analytics,
and empowered human operators—all working inconcert.
Solve the robot data problem and pave the path
to automation with Cognite Data Fusion®, theleading Industrial DataOps platform.

WHY COGNITE DATA FUSION® →BENEFITS FOR YOUR TEAMS →CONTACT SALES →Want to know more about our product?

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