Spot at Ontario Power Generation: Automating Circuit Breaker Tripping and Racking

There are an estimated 30,000 instances of arc flash each year in the United States alone, and one to two fatalities occur daily in North America.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has five Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots deployed throughout their Enterprise Innovation division. In 2022, the team sought to see if Spot’s dexterous arm could be used to assist in tripping and racking out a 600 volt breaker—an activity that is high risk for arc flash. Now, Boston Dynamics engineers have taken this application to the next level by fully automating the procedure. Spot can perform the entire operation autonomously, with a human issuing high level commands safely out of harm’s way.