Have you ever seen a blimp? If you’ve never seen one in real-life, there’s a good chance you might have seen one in photos and in movies/TV shows, and you know that they are huge. Given the surface area of a blimp, checking for leaks manually and by using humans would be a very tedious task, and it could also mean that there could be spots that might be missed.
Looking to make checking for leaks more efficient and taking out the possible human error element, the folks at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works lab have developed a robot called the SPIDER whose job is to check their blimps for any leaks. The name of the robot is rather apt as the robot certainly crawls around the blimp in a way that is reminiscent of a spider.
So how does the robot work? Basically the robot is two part: one part will crawl along the outside of the ship, while the other will go on the inside of the blimp’s surface. The outer robot will shine light on the blimp’s fabric and the robot on the inside will detect any pinhole light (thus indicating a leak) with its sensors, and when a leak is detected, it will patch it up.
It sounds and looks like a pretty cool process so if you have a couple of minutes to spare, you can check the SPIDER out in action in the video above.
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