How robots can help your maintenance team increase wrench time

We’ve been hearing about the skilled trades gap for years. But it’s not a headline on the plant floor—it’s a daily crisis of bandwidth for many maintenance teams.

Right now, your most experienced maintenance techs, the ones who know your machines better than anyone, are spending hours walking the floor every day. They’re carrying clipboards through 400,000-square-foot facilities, climbing sub-basements, and checking gauges to see if something is vibrating wrong. Every minute a tech is walking is a minute they aren't turning a wrench. 

Fortunately, robotics is helping to solve this problem. Teams are deploying agile mobile robots, like Boston Dynamic’s Spot^®, to take over mundane tasks and give experienced techs the time they need to apply their expertise.

I explored exactly how this is happening with John Weiler, Senior Global Manager at Boston Dynamics, in a recent episode of Wrench Factor. Read on to see how robot-first inspection strategies help maintenance teams reclaim capacity.

Why inspection rounds are reducing your maintenance capacity

Maintenance teams face a capacity problem that worsens every year due to a labor shortage that, according to Weiler, "is only going in one direction." When technicians have a long list of work orders, they're going to prioritize urgent repairs and PMs ahead of thorough walk-throughs to collect sensor data. The data matters, but bandwidth forces a difficult choice. Here’s how those daily decisions significantly reduce your team’s capacity over the long-term:

Time lost to manual data collection

The time required for manual inspections sounds trivial until you add it up. Traversing a 400,000-square-foot facility to check a boiler's temperature or inspect a bearing pulls technicians away from their core work. These walks happen daily or weekly, taking up capacity that could go toward clearing work order backlogs.

Risk trade-offs for maintenance teams

Plants make calculated decisions on risk every day. As Weiler explains, "People know they have steam leaks, people know they have air leaks, some might even have gas leaks." Teams choose between fixing a bearing that could shut down a line or addressing known leaks. Both choices matter, but limited capacity forces the trade-off, and something always gets deprioritized.

Safety barriers in confined and hazardous spaces

Some inspection areas present safety challenges. Going underneath a paper machine the size of a football field means entering a basement with confined spaces, moving equipment, and PPE. Weiler notes that "some of these rooms you can't even go in...You would have to do a shutdown of a line to be able to access some of these areas."

These legitimate barriers limit how much inspection work humans can safely accomplish.

What a robot-first inspection strategy means for maintenance

With a robot focused strategy, data collection shifts away from humans, reclaiming capacity for skilled work. 

"The robot is not turning wrenches, it’s not fixing things, it’s not not executing work orders," says Weiler. 

Maintenance robots, like Spot from Boston Dynamics, enable humans to do that work instead. Think of them as a roving hub for detecting possible equipment failure. These robots can take sensors, which are typically fixed to machines or carried by technicians, and make them mobile and autonomous. For example:

• Acoustic and ultrasonic imaging: A robot can use these sensors to listen for air, steam, and gas leaks at frequencies the human ear can’t, and catch bearing degradation weeks before a traditional accelerometer would.
  
  
• Thermal and gas detection: If you send a human into a confined space or a room prone to ammonia leaks, you have to shut down the line to ensure their safety. A robot, on the other hand, can walk in and take a reading without disrupting production.
  
  
• Visual contextual understanding: Language-vision models enable robots to take pictures, answer questions about what's happening in the picture, then trigger a workflow based on the outcome.

When robots handle inspections, technicians can focus on their backlog. As Weiler puts it, “Robots empower you by collecting data in areas where you don't have the time or don't want to spend that time."

How to create a strategy for robotic maintenance

Here is a great starter blueprint for rolling out a robotic maintenance strategy:

1. Identify high-value inspection areas

Start with areas where inspection is time-consuming, dangerous, or frequently skipped, including:

• Leak-prone areas: Couplings, fittings, and connection points
• Confined spaces: Basements, elevated platforms, and restricted areas
• Multi-story equipment: Paper machines, boilers, and tall process equipment
• Hazardous environments: Areas requiring extensive PPE or line shutdowns

Audit your team’s walking time by putting a pedometer on techs for a week. Map out how many hours are spent on travel vs. wrench time. That travel time is your automation target.

2. Apply the 3D rule

Look for the dull, dirty, and dangerous work. If a route requires a technician to enter a crawl space, wear heavy PPE, or walk the same path every single day to check a boiler temperature, it’s a candidate for a robot route.

3. Define what good looks like for each asset

For each piece of equipment, determine acceptable temperature ranges, vibration levels, and normal readings. Baselines enable the robot to detect anomalies and trigger appropriate workflows.

4. Automate the entire maintenance workflow 

You don't want the robot to just find a leak—you also want it to analyze the severity and automatically trigger a work order in your CMMS. Plan how your inspection data will flow into existing work order systems. Determine what should trigger automatic work orders versus alerts requiring human review. This connection turns detected issues into actionable maintenance tasks.

5. Develop a change management plan

Weiler emphasizes that, "like any new implementation of technology, it starts with education, it starts with change management. We have to make sure that people are aligned in terms of what a robot is going to do and how it’s going to make their lives better.”

Connecting robotic inspection data with your CMMS

Configuring equipment baselines and anomaly thresholds

Setup involves telling the robot what equipment exists in each location and what good looks like as a baseline.

"If we tell the robot, 'Hey, in this room, here is the type of equipment and here's what good should be as a baseline,' yes, you can set thresholds and you can set ranges,” Weiler explains.

When the robot enters an area of the map and uses sensors, it compares collected data against established baselines.

Automatic work order generation from detected issues

When the robot detects an anomaly, the system generates a corrective maintenance workflow based on how you’ve configured the triggers.

Routing inspection data to the right stakeholders

Inspection data feeds to multiple stakeholders throughout the organization, not just maintenance. Operations, reliability, and safety teams all benefit from consistent, reliable inspection data collected on predictable schedules.

Proving the ROI of robotics in maintenance

When you’re looking at the ROI of robotic maintenance, you have to look at the cost of silence. What is it costing you when your machines aren’t talking to you until they’ve already failed?

Let’s look at two real-world examples that move the needle:

• The seven-figure save: A cement plant on the west coast integrated robotics into their maintenance rounds. This is a 100-year-old facility where things are constantly breaking. During a routine autonomous patrol, a robot detected a gas leak and an impending kiln failure that the human crew had missed. If that kiln went down, the company would be looking at a multi-day shutdown and a loss of over a million dollars.
  
  
• From hours to weeks: In the semiconductor world, downtime is catastrophic. One manufacturer used to rely on manual vibration checks that gave them a few hours of warning before a pump failed. By putting robots on the beat with ultrasonic sensors, they started catching degradation days, and sometimes weeks, in advance. It meant the difference between a midnight emergency repair and a planned maintenance window.

Robotic maintenance: The strategic choice for today’s manufacturers

We’re standing at a massive crossroads in manufacturing. Spending your limited capacity on travel time around a facility is a losing game. The labor gap isn't closing and your equipment isn't getting any younger. Giving your team autonomous tools, like robotics, can solve this challenge and help the entire operation be more efficient.

When you bring robotics into the workforce, you’re reclaiming the human element of maintenance. You’re ensuring that when your tech is on the clock, they are solving problems, turning wrenches, and keeping the lights on instead of putting miles on their boots.

It’s time to stop talking about the future of robotics and start deploying it. Let the robot take the walk so your people can take the win.