In 2003, Mother Nature turned off the lights on the East Coast. The reason: a short circuit a hot summer day caused on by a chance encounter between an overgrown tree branch and a sagging power line. The problem quickly cascaded through the system, triggering the biggest blackout in North American history. The outage left 50 million people in the U.S. and Canada without power and by some estimates cost more than $6 billion. But the truth is, most people don't give much thought to our electrical grid until something goes wrong.

Ask any technician who has ever scaled a massive wind turbine and they'll tell you: Manual inspections of industrial assets can be dangerous and imprecise. Today, companies are tapping advanced tech tools like autonomous robots and drones, as well as AI-powered predictive analytics, to make inspections not only safer but more accurate. Avitas Systems, launched in 2017 by GE Ventures, is one of the emerging pioneers who are upending traditional modes of industrial inspection. The Boston-based company combines autonomous robot and drone inspections, AI analytics and digital data warehousing in a single service. Not yet two years old, Avitas Systems already counts heavy hitters in the oil and gas, electric power and transportation industries among its client roster.

In a picnic area at General Electric Co.'s Global Research Center, a group of scientists and engineers are working on a new industrial revolution that will involve robots, drones and artificial intelligence. GE has been developing robot and artificial intelligence technologies for many years now. But these researchers in Niskayuna are part of GE's latest effort to monetize that technology with the launch of Avitas Systems, a new GE-created company being incubated in Boston with help from scientists here in the Capital Region. Avitas is creating technologies that will be artificial intelligence, or AI, combined with robots and predictive data analytics and software to provide high-tech inspection services to energy and transportation companies. On Tuesday, a team supervised by John Lizzi, director of robotics at GE Global Research, and Judy Guzzo, a project leader, were performing drone testing on a simulated oil rig flare stack.

BERLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today at GE's Minds Machines Europe event, GE Ventures (NYSE:GE) announced the launch of Avitas Systems, a new company that will use predictive data analytics, robotics, and artificial intelligence to deliver advanced inspection services to the oil and gas, transportation, and energy industries. Routine inspections can be slow and costly, and often include humans performing high-risk tasks. Data is manually collected and processed, and can take weeks to analyze. By reducing high-risk tasks through robotics, Avitas Systems can make inspection processes safer and more efficient through data automation, decreasing costs by up to 25%. By performing inspections based on anticipated risk, instead of regular time intervals, Avitas Systems can also help to increase asset longevity.