The Top 3 Takeaways You Need to Know from the 2024 Energy, Drone, and Robotics Summit

The Top 3 Takeaways You Need to Know from the 2024 Energy, Drone, and Robotics Summit

HUVR touched down in Houston last week for the 2024 Energy, Drone, and Robotics Summit – here’s everything you need to know from our team on the ground.

Attending the Energy, Drone, and Robotics Summit is a time-honored tradition for the HUVRdata team, and what a treat it was to attend again for the eighth annual summit this year. Watching this event flourish over the last few years has been immensely rewarding as the show has grown from a few hundred to a couple thousand people, bringing together the most cutting-edge technology and service providers with essential owner-operators to recognize and showcase digital excellence in the energy and robotics landscape. 

This year, the atmosphere was teeming with excitement as attendees perused the show floor full of drones large and small, quadrupeds of all shapes, sizes, and applications, and even humanoid robots equipped with cameras in the place of faces. The roundtable discussions and presentations were even more invaluable than the exciting robotics – although, of course, nothing beats watching a humanoid robot walking its quadruped counterpart through the show floor or all the quadruped robots gathering to “dance” to Who Let the Dogs Out.

There was so much more action going on at this show it was hard to pick just one takeaway to emphasize the massive changes and impact displayed at this show. That’s why we’ve boiled everything down into these top three takeaways that you need to know about the industry from this year’s Energy, Drone, and Robotics Summit:

1. The Tech Explosion: The last few years in the energy industry have seen an explosion of new technologies more rapidly than we’ve seen in decades. Quadrupeds are an excellent example of this technology boom: a few years ago, the main name on the market was Boston Dynamics’s Spot the dog. Today, there are dozens of models of all colors and creeds from Ghost Robotics’s Vision 60 to Unitree’s Go2 model. These robots have evolved immensely with time, and have taken on all kinds of new applications in the process, quickly becoming a useful tool for any inspection that could benefit from removing the risk of humans in the field, like confined space or at height inspections. 
2. Interoperability: While technology has been booming, creating massive data sets in numerous formats, many companies seem to be struggling with how to effectively adopt these robotics and enable their different systems to communicate with each other in an effective way. Companies are adopting numerous systems and their data is getting locked into their individualized systems, rendering it near-useless. More and more, organizations are seeking out cohesive solutions like HUVR that can communicate across multiple platforms to contextualize and effectively utilize the data coming in from the hottest new drones and robotics in the field. 
3. Data Storage: Alongside challenges to get systems talking, companies are struggling with the sheer amount of data and data formats placed in their hands when it gets back from the field. Storage is often unable to handle such massive data sets if they can hold the file format at all. Teams are paying by the -byte –from Giga- to Tera– and facing infinitely rising data storage costs in the process. Organizations will need to adopt cohesive data management solutions that can store massive and varied amounts of data as technology and robotics-enabled inspections continue to exponentially explode.

Overall, the need for seamless data solutions like HUVR that are interoperable, can handle massive storage amounts, and can accommodate varied robotics and drones systems is clear, and we’re energized by the growth we’ve seen both at this event and in the industry over the past few years. We can’t wait to see what’s next for energy, drones, and robotics, and are thrilled to be part of the next wave of connected workers. Thanks to the team at InnovateEnergy and the Energy Drone and Robotics Coalition for a smashing event – we can’t wait to see how they top this one next year.