A bearing that is about to fail runs hot. An electrical connection with elevated resistance runs hot. Insulation that has degraded runs hot. Heat signature anomalies precede most mechanical and electrical failures by days, weeks, or months — which means a facility that collects thermal data on its equipment regularly is catching faults before they become failures.
The challenge has always been collection frequency. Sending a thermographer with a handheld thermal camera through a 500-point inspection route weekly is expensive, slow, and often practically impossible in facilities with limited inspection staffing. Boston Dynamics Spot changes the economics of thermal inspection by making weekly or daily collection as practical as monthly was before.
What the Spot Cam+ Thermal Payload Detects
The Spot Cam+ payload includes a FLIR Lepton radiometric thermal camera that captures absolute temperature readings across its field of view to a fraction of a degree Celsius. Spot's inspection software establishes a thermal baseline for each equipment point over the first several weeks of deployment, then flags deviations that exceed configurable thresholds.
Documented fault types that thermal inspection detects early: bearing overheating in rotating equipment (typically 15-30 days before audible noise or vibration anomaly), hot spots in electrical panels and switchgear (minutes to weeks before failure, depending on severity), heat exchanger fouling (gradual temperature profile changes over weeks), steam trap failure (thermal signature of bypassing or stuck traps), and insulation degradation on process piping (temperature loss along pipe runs).
The Cargill Implementation
Cargill's Amsterdam Multiseed facility deployed Spot alongside Boston Dynamics' Orbit platform for continuous autonomous inspection. The results — reported by Boston Dynamics — show an 87.3% reduction in defects compared to preventive-only maintenance programs. That's not a marginal improvement. That's a fundamental shift in the fraction of faults caught before failure vs. after.
Building a Thermal Inspection Program
A Spot thermal inspection program requires three things: a programmed inspection route covering all critical equipment points, a baseline period (typically 3–4 weeks) during which the software establishes normal thermal signatures, and an alert routing workflow that gets anomaly flags to the right engineer quickly.
Actel Robotics handles the route programming, baseline configuration, and CMMS integration as part of the implementation service. The ongoing alert review is your team's job — Spot surfaces the data, your engineers make the decisions. Use our inspection ROI calculator to model the downtime avoidance value at your facility, or contact us for an assessment.