Robotic inspection in New Zealand: substations, water assets and ports

Inspection rounds at a zone substation, a pump station or a port switchroom are a good match for robots on paper: the same route, the same equipment and the same readings, repeated on a schedule. In practice the robot also has to cross a wet gravel yard, send its data somewhere useful, stay inside your permit system and keep working through a southerly.

What are New Zealand asset owners already doing?

Most published New Zealand examples of remote inspection use drones or underwater vehicles, alongside an earlier ground robot trial. These are the asset owners’ own programmes.

• Transpower, ground robots: in July 2018 Transpower began a month-long pilot at Albany Substation with two tracked robots developed with Massey University. They carried cameras, microphones, zoom and thermal imaging. Transpower said 25 of its 174 substations were remote from its core workforce, so a callout could take more than 90 minutes to answer, and described the robots as potential “eyes on the ground”.
• Transpower, drones on the grid: in January 2019 Transpower said its service provider was testing drones that fly pre-programmed routes between towers, inspect several conductors in one pass and reduce the need for helicopter flights. Images were being used to develop software that classifies defects.
• Lines companies: MainPower began testing drones in 2023 for visual and thermal checks of lines, poles and transformers, flown within line of sight under Civil Aviation Rule Part 101, with field operators trained with help from Orion. In March 2025 Aurora Energy had Northpower run a combined drone and ground-based acoustic inspection of 899 poles between Alexandra and Roxburgh, with the drone camera kept pointing down so it would not capture buildings or windows.
• Ports: in July 2026 Lyttelton Port Company announced a national safety award for using drones to remove people from work at height. Uses include container roof inspections, coal stockpile monitoring, terminal pavement inspections and seawall surveys, with thousands of container roof inspections done by drone at its MidlandPort site in Rolleston.
• Hydro generation: in April 2025 Meridian Energy said it was trialling an underwater remotely operated vehicle at Benmore Power Station to inspect canals, dams and spillways. The aim is to rely less on divers and on dewatering, which can keep generating units out of service for days.

Where do legged robots fit?

Drones suit lines, towers, roofs and stockpiles. Inside the fence, the work is different. Substations have gravel yards, kerbs, cable trench covers and steps into control buildings, and plant rooms have stairs, grating and tight aisles. Legged robots can step over that ground, carry several sensors at once and repeat a route precisely, which makes readings comparable over time.

Overseas, the published examples are mostly pilots. In early 2024 Avangrid’s United Illuminating business in Connecticut piloted a legged robot at two substations to read analogue gauges, take thermal images of transformer and breaker phases and, optionally, sense acoustic anomalies. It was first driven by an on-site operator with a tablet, with remote operation in development. DEEP Robotics reports substation deployments where quadrupeds with visible-light and thermal cameras and lidar read instruments and check equipment temperatures; those results are published by the manufacturer.

What can a legged robot inspect?

Inspection task	What the robot collects	What still needs a person
Visual rounds	Zoomed images of equipment, oil levels, doors and fences, compared with a baseline	Judging unfamiliar defects and deciding on action
Thermal survey	Temperatures on connections, bushings and breaker phases, compared across phases	Interpretation, allowing for load and sun
Gauge reading	Analogue pressure, temperature, level and density gauges read by computer vision	Confirming out-of-range readings and faulty gauges
Acoustic sensing	Imaged air or gas leaks and abnormal sound or vibration	Diagnosis and follow-up testing
Security patrol	Fence lines, gates, building doors and signs of intrusion	Response to breaches and police liaison
Water and wastewater plant	Pump bearings, valve positions, leaks and dosing areas, where sensors are fitted	Process decisions and confined space entry

Boston Dynamics, for example, describes its inspection robot reading gauges with a pan-tilt-zoom camera, finding hot spots with a thermal camera and using acoustic imagers to locate air leaks.

How do HSWA and WorkSafe guidance apply?

Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, a PCBU must eliminate risks to health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable, and minimise them where elimination is not reasonably practicable. A robot that does a routine round in an energised yard, or looks inside a tank, can be part of that elimination step. WorkSafe’s confined spaces guidance makes the same point plainly: always check first whether the work can be done with equipment from outside, and do not go in if you do not have to.

The robot is also plant under HSWA, which brings its own risks: people working near a moving machine, charging, and recovery when it stops somewhere awkward. Record those in your risk assessment and engage the workers who will work alongside it, as the Act requires. Where a contractor, the asset owner and the equipment supplier all have duties for the same work, they need to work together on them.

HSWA is changing. Amendments received Royal Assent on 9 July 2026, and most provisions come into force on 1 April 2027. They concentrate duties on critical risks, those likely to cause death or serious harm. Work near high voltage and in confined spaces is likely to fall in that group, so check how the amended duties apply to your rounds when you plan a deployment.

Safe distances and hazardous areas

Near high-voltage equipment, the robot is another object moving through the yard. NZECP 34:2001, the mandatory code of practice for electrical safe distances, sets minimum approach distances for people near exposed live parts, and its distances also guide the design of electrical works within substations. Plan routes so the robot, and any mast or payload it carries, stays outside the distances your network applies to people, under the same access rules.

Classified explosive atmospheres, such as parts of some fuel, gas and chemical sites, are a separate question. The Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010 call up parts of the AS/NZS 60079 series for electrical installations in hazardous areas, and equipment used in a zone needs to be certified for it. ANYbotics announced an IECEx and ATEX Zone 1 certified legged robot in 2022, but most general-purpose quadrupeds are not certified for explosive atmospheres. Confirm certification before any robot enters a classified area.

How does it connect to asset management?

Robot data is only useful if it reaches the people and systems that plan maintenance. Map each inspection point on the robot’s route to an asset ID in your enterprise asset management or maintenance system. Set thresholds so readings outside limits raise a notification or work request for an engineer to review, rather than sitting in a separate dashboard. Where the platform supports it, fleet software can export results through standard interfaces.

Decide early who reviews robot findings, how quickly, and how false alarms are tuned out. Keep images and readings long enough to show trends.

Connectivity and cyber security

Many substations and pump stations sit in rural areas with limited mobile coverage, and switchyards are harsh radio environments. Plan for a private network, a local mesh, or robots that store results and upload on return to the dock. Remote control of a robot inside a critical site is an operational technology question. Keep the robot on a segregated network, control supplier remote access, and cover it in your existing OT security and supply chain reviews.

Will it cope with New Zealand site conditions?

Check each item against your wettest, windiest and most exposed sites:

• IP rating of the robot, each payload and the dock, under IEC 60529 (first digit for dust, second for water)
• Operating temperature range, including charging, against winter frosts and snow at inland and alpine sites
• Salt spray and corrosion at coastal substations, ports and treatment plants
• Wind, driving rain and mud on camera and lidar windows, and a cleaning routine for them
• Terrain, such as loose gravel, slopes, drainage channels and stock or wildlife near rural yards

Who stays in control?

A robot should enter a substation or plant under the same access and permit arrangements as any other entry, with an authorised person responsible for each mission. The robot only inspects: it does not operate switchgear, issue permits or isolate plant. Operators choose when missions run, can pause or recall the robot, and decide what happens with its findings. Start with one site and a defined set of rounds, run robot and manual inspections in parallel for a period, and compare results before extending.

Robotx can help you scope which rounds, sites and data flows are worth testing first.