Offshore blades are critical, but inspecting them is hard, costly, and infrequent. Today a full campaign means dedicated vessel time and heavy planning.

ADBISOV makes inspection routine: an autonomous drone launched and recovered from a Service Operation Vessel. It’s space-enabled throughout, using satellite connectivity for remote operation, and precise satellite positioning.

The payoff: lower-cost, more frequent inspections → better data, earlier damage detection, smarter repair planning, and improved turbine availability.

We’re delighted to be working with ORE Catapult, the UK’s leading technology innovation and research centre for offshore renewable energy, on the project.

More to come as we progress. 🌊🚁🛰️

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Now the real work begins. It’s an 18-month development programme, followed by a further period of field validation before anything reaches customers: because building useful technology for the wind industry takes far more than a good idea. It requires development, testing, validation in the field and plenty of iteration before a product is ready for everyday use.

Over the coming months, we’ll be working on new capabilities aimed at making blade inspections and maintenance decisions faster, more consistent and easier to scale and starting to look beyond blades at other parts of the turbine too. This includes further developments in autonomous inspections, AI-assisted analysis and the tools that help operators turn inspection data into action.

Some of our most successful developments started with a simple operational frustration.

The Repair Now Ratio (RNR) is a good example. Anyone managing hundreds of blade damages across a fleet knows how quickly repair planning can become a maze of spreadsheets, competing priorities and difficult decisions. RNR was developed to provide a clearer way to prioritise repairs based on risk and economic impact.

That’s often how innovation starts. Not with technology for technology’s sake, but with a practical problem that needs solving.

We’re also growing the team behind this work:  recruiting robotics, flight-test, data and customer solutions roles over the coming months. 

If there’s a task in your workflow that feels unnecessarily slow, repetitive or difficult, we’d love to hear about it. Some of our best ideas have come directly from conversations with people working in the field every day.

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Every Perceptual Robotics contract includes a yearly teardown of the Dhalion system. Our Support team strips it down, cleans it, and reviews the equipment before it heads back out to the field.

🔧 A full annual teardown and clean

🔍 A component-by-component review by our Support team

🛠️ Carried out in our Bristol and Greek workshops

We are the manufacturer, so we take real pride in building systems that are reliable and that perform in the field as expected. Looking after them once they are out there is part of the same job. The team knows each system inside out.

It is the kind of maintenance you rarely think about, right up until it is the reason an inspection went ahead without a hitch.

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24 years ago, a wind turbine in Germany lost a blade during a storm. What makes this case worth studying isn’t the storm, it’s what came out afterward: the operator admitted there had been a known defect in the blade before the storm hit, and it had been ignored.

That single sentence in the incident record is, in miniature, the entire case for predictive blade maintenance:

• A defect existed and was known.
• No system tracked how it was evolving.
• An external load (wind) turned a manageable flaw into a full blade loss.

This is exactly the failure mode that routine drone inspection paired with AI-based damage detection was built to close. A defect flagged once isn’t always useful on its own; what matters is comparing scans over time, quantifying crack or delamination growth rate, and forecasting the load threshold at which that specific defect becomes critical. That turns “known but ignored” into “known, tracked, and scheduled for repair before the next storm season.”

The technology to catch this exists today and it is inexpensive compared to the gains. In 2002, it didn’t yet. The gap between those two facts is the opportunity in front of the industry now.

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When the temperature climbs, inspecting turbines gets harder for everyone: the pilots walking the site, the technicians in full kit, and, we like to think, the drones too.

Somewhere out there, Dot is eyeing up a tiny pair of sunglasses and wondering why the launch point could not have been next to the air conditioning. 🕶️

Jokes aside, heat changes how a day on site runs. 🌡️ Batteries behave differently, kit needs looking after, and planning around the hottest part of the day makes a real difference to both safety and workflow.

How is the heat treating your team this summer?

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As a team, these moments matter. They help us, spark new ideas, and remind us that behind every line of code, customer call, inspection, or product update is a group of people working towards the same goal.

Of course, it wasn’t all meetings. We also enjoyed a round of disc golf, and the opportunity to catch up outside of work.

Building great technology takes great teamwork, and great teams are built through trust, shared experiences, and celebrating milestones together.

We’re already looking forward to the next one! 🌍

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The funding will help the company expand what it offers to the wind industry, increase its presence across existing and new markets, strengthen its offshore capabilities, and continue scaling the products that customers rely on every day.

Perceptual Robotics is grateful to Innovate UK for its continued support of innovation in the UK technology sector, alongside the backing of its shareholders and investors, in reaching this milestone.

Since its last investment round, Perceptual Robotics has expanded internationally, growing its customer base across Europe, North America, Latin America and beyond. Its technology now supports inspections in environments ranging from the forests of northern Sweden to the Caribbean and some of the world’s largest wind turbines.

Matthew Jellicoe, director of OnePlanet. Capital, said of the round. “It has been great to see such strong investor support for Perceptual Robotics.The business has strong momentum now across both onshore and offshore wind, and it is clear there are multiple verticals that the company can expand into over the next 24 months.” 

Evangelos Kosmidis, CEO & General Partner from Loggerhead said “Perceptual Robotics has continued to demonstrate the technical expertise, commercial vision, and execution needed to become a key enabler in the wind energy sector while advancing the resilience and efficiency of the clean energy transition. The company’s continued progress has further strengthened our confidence in the team and the impact they are well positioned to create.”

Eleonore Cottarel, Partner, Investing For Purpose, said “Perceptual Robotics exemplifies the type of company we want to support: one that combines technological innovation with meaningful, measurable environmental impact. By helping wind assets operate more efficiently, safely and for longer, the company is strengthening the resilience of renewable energy infrastructure while accelerating the clean energy transition. We are delighted to back Kostas and the team as they continue to scale their impact internationally.”

“This funding is a vote of confidence in the work our team has put in over the last few years, and in the direction we’re taking the business. It gives us the resources to move faster on the products our customers are asking for.” said Kostas Karachalios, CEO of Perceptual Robotics.

The company’s development has been driven by ongoing conversations with operators, service providers and blade experts about the practical problems they face, whether that’s inspection speed, damage prioritisation, or finding better ways to manage growing fleets. Those conversations have shaped developments including autonomous inspection systems, AI-assisted damage detection, the Repair Now Ratio, and platform integrations released over recent years.

With this new funding, Perceptual Robotics aims to move faster, delivering more products, more capability, and support for more turbines,  while continuing to build tools that help the wind industry keep turbines generating power and blades in service for longer.

The post Perceptual Robotics Secures Over £4 Million to Expand Wind Turbine Inspection and Maintenance Technology appeared first on Perceptual Robotics.

The conversation gets into the detail of how autonomous drone inspections actually works on a wind turbine. You press play, the drone flies the turbine on its own, and the data comes back for analysis. Lucia talks through why pairing AI with an experienced human reviewer beats either one working alone, and what it takes to capture damage on a blade that most people would walk straight past. The tip of a large blade can travel at close to 350 km/h making each water drop a bullet and a small crack that goes unnoticed can grow into a serious problem. Catching it early is the whole point.

There is plenty from the field too. Offshore lessons: those things  that only make sense once you have flown from a moving boat, a heatwave that pushed wind turbines to its limits, though the drone could continue, and a few stories that never make it into a brochure.

The episode is in Spanish. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Listen on Spotify

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“I started to quite like the portal.”

Not exactly the kind of quote you’d expect to find in a marketing brochure.

And that’s probably why we liked it.

Software in our industry doesn’t need to be exciting. It needs to help people get their jobs done.

The same customer went on to say that the damage categorisations with the associated cost and Repair Now Ratio  were “pretty much bang on the money”.

Comments like that matter because they come from people using the platform day after day. People reviewing real inspections, making maintenance decisions and dealing with the practical realities of blade management.

Over the years we’ve spent countless hours improving classification models, workflows and review tools.

It’s easy to focus on new features.

Sometimes the most satisfying feedback is simply hearing that the system works the way people hoped it would.

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Based in Sweden, Skyforest is currently one of the most northerly Dhalion operators in our network. The company brings extensive experience from drone operations in forestry, often working in remote locations and demanding environments. That expertise is now being applied to wind turbine inspections.

Two results stand out immediately.

• Using Dhalion, the Skyforest team inspected eight Siemens turbines with 170-metre rotor diameters (85 m blade) in a single ten-hour working day. Considering the size of those turbines, that’s an impressive achievement. (For comparison: An Airbus A380 is 72.7 m long and The Statue of Liberty (ground to torch) is  93 m tall, or consider a blade is equal to 1.7 olympic swimming pools)
• In a different deployment, see the Case Study,  the team was able to spot two cracks just as the drone landed and they were reviewing the images as part of their Q&A Workflow. Spotting those cracks in the field allowed early warning to the operator and mitigation measures put in place in no time.

The project also demonstrates something we’ve seen repeatedly over the years: organisations with strong operational discipline and professional drone workflows adapt exceptionally well to autonomous blade inspections.

Technology matters. People using it matter just as much or even more.

Read the full case study here (PDF DOWNLOAD)  or visit www.perceptual-robotics.com/case-studies/ to see other case studies!

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