At last year’s Bolting Symposium — the 13th annual — she said the highlight was playing “Bolting Bingo” against the many self-proclaimed “torque dorks” who were in the room. A former engineer and planner at ExxonMobil, Elliott has spent years thinking about how to improve the infrastructure that moves oil, gas, and petrochemicals. Bolts are what she landed on.
Specifically, the bolts that connect sections of pipe (technically called “bolted flange joints”). These bolts require hard, physical work to loosen and tighten, and are the source of many pipefitters’ injuries. Like many trade industries, there’s also a labor shortage.
It’s the kind of idea that could fundamentally change this particular blue collar job if widely adopted, making the workers safer and more productive. The robot comes in two main pieces that fit around a pipe. Powered by batteries, the robot can slide across the pipe once it’s attached and quickly loosen and tighten four bolts at a time.
Elliott said Nexterity has developed a few different configurations of the robot to fit different standard pipe sizes, but they’re all small enough to fit in a Pelican case and be carried by a single worker. That makes them easy to deploy to new sites — flexibility that is crucial to Nexterity’s business model of treating the robot like rental construction equipment. Elliott said she arrived at this particular design as a result of conversations she’s had over the last few years — not just at the Bolting Symposium, but also with members of the Pressure Vessels & Piping Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
And so when you have that much repeatability, you have a fantastic candidate for automation.” It’s a pretty straightforward idea, but one that Elliott believes has a lot of upside.
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