Musings

Hanging mid-air ten floors up, a shiny metal robot works its magic. This is no ordinary robotic workspace; this robot cleans away the dirt accumulated on the leading edge of a wind turbine. Controlled by four long cables attached to winches on the ground, the robot is a puppet whose strings are carefully pulled to orchestrate a wide variety of tasks from cleaning to inspection to repair, all suspended hundreds of feet off the ground and can be swapped easily by simply swapping the arm attached.

Every year, 11 million metric tons of waste enters our oceans from the US, 6.6 million of which remains in coastal waters. If you’ve gone to the coast recently, you might have seen remnants of this – plastic bottles and bags littered across a beach or a marina.

Recycling is an important solution for addressing climate change, because producing new products from recovered materials requires fewer raw resources and less energy. According to Project Drawdown, recycling can reduce at least 10 gigaton of CO₂ by 2050. However, sorting out recyclables isn’t an easy job, which is why over 50% of recyclables still end up in the landfill. This is an area ripe for automation that has a huge environmental impact.

We’re covering Andy’s story as the first one in our Founder Spotlight series because it’s both educational and inspirational. We hope you will like it and, even better, see yourself in the story and start thinking about how you can contribute to the climate crisis!

This is a question I’m commonly asked. Indeed, there’s nothing directly related to robotics in the climate solution catalog on Project Drawdown, usually referred to as the most comprehensive list of existing climate solutions within the climate community. These solutions range across a wide swath of sectors: renewable energy sources, sustainable building design and retrofit, more efficient and cleaner means of transportation, sustainable agriculture practices, new manufacturing practices and carbon sequestration using plants, land or oceans.

Last Friday was Earth Day. This year’s theme was “Invest in Our Planet”, focused on accelerating solutions to combat climate change and activate everyone to do their part. On this occasion, I’d like to share a project that’s deeply personal to me and deserves more daylight in order to make the world a better place. Introducing: Nirva Labs!