Brazil’s wind sector has expanded rapidly over the past decade, turning the country into one of the world’s largest wind energy markets. Installed capacity grew from 2.5 GW in 2012 to 22 GW in 2022, and with that growth came a more demanding operating environment for owners, service providers, and engineering teams responsible for blade condition management.
For ArthWind, that growth translated into a simple operational reality: more turbines, tighter timelines, and no room for unreliable inspections. As customer demand accelerated, the company needed a blade inspection workflow that could scale across a large national fleet while still delivering the image quality, repeatability, and engineering value that wind owners expect.
Clobotics helped ArthWind meet that need with the IBIS™ blade inspection platform. By combining a customized DJI M300 drone with Clobotics flight planning, flight control, and computer vision workflows, ArthWind was able to scale inspections in Brazil while preserving reliability and reducing friction in pilot onboarding.
By February 2023, ArthWind had completed its 5,000th wind turbine inspection using the Clobotics Drone as a Service offering.
The challenge: scale without compromising reliability
Since 2017, ArthWind has worked with wind site managers to use inspection data to support maintenance decisions. As demand grew, the company needed a platform that could support higher inspection volumes without lowering inspection quality or increasing rework risk.
That requirement was especially important in a market like Brazil, where the installed fleet was growing quickly and operators were becoming more data-driven in the way they managed turbine performance. Fast inspections were valuable, but speed alone was not enough. Customers still needed dependable image capture, consistent execution in the field, and analysis that could support engineering decisions after the flight.
In practical terms, ArthWind needed a system that could do four things well:
- inspect turbines quickly with minimal downtime
- produce reliable, repeatable inspection evidence
- help the team scale capacity as demand increased
- convert field data into information that engineering teams could use
The solution: IBIS for scalable blade inspections
Clobotics worked with ArthWind to scale blade inspections in Brazil using the IBIS™ inspection platform, built on a customized DJI M300 drone. The value of the system was not just the drone hardware itself, but the operating workflow around it: flight planning, flight control, image capture, and computer vision-supported defect recognition.
According to the case study video, the system can inspect all three blades on a turbine in as little as 18 minutes, helping reduce downtime while still capturing the volume of high-quality imagery needed for blade analysis. Clobotics also reports that its platform has been used to inspect more than 75,000 turbines worldwide, giving service providers a workflow that has already been tested at meaningful scale.
For ArthWind, that mattered because the company was not only trying to inspect more turbines. It was trying to build a repeatable operating model for a growth market. The platform needed to be reliable in the field, usable by pilots under real conditions, and structured enough to support downstream review and maintenance planning.
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Operational results in Brazil
The clearest sign of success was scale. ArthWind says it inspected more than 3,000 turbines in one inspection season using the Clobotics system. At the time, Brazil had roughly 9,000 installed wind turbines, which meant ArthWind was covering more than 35% of the national installed fleet in a single market.
That level of throughput would not have been possible if the platform were difficult to deploy or slow to operationalize. One of the more important details from the interviews is onboarding speed: ArthWind says new pilots could be trained in as little as two days, helping the company expand inspection capacity without creating a long training bottleneck.
The broader business result was that ArthWind could respond to rising demand in Brazil with a workflow built for both productivity and consistency. Instead of choosing between speed and quality, the company was able to scale inspection coverage while keeping reliability central to the service.
Why the workflow mattered to customers
The interviews in the video make an important point: wind owners are not paying for aerial images alone. They want confidence that the inspection data is complete, that the turbine does not need to be revisited because of poor evidence, and that the resulting information can support maintenance decisions.
That is why this case study is as much about data quality as it is about drone speed. ArthWind emphasizes reliability as non-negotiable, and the video repeatedly points back to the same operational goal: collect strong field evidence, consolidate what it means, and turn it into actionable engineering recommendations for the customer.
In other words, the value of the system is not just faster flying. It is faster flying linked to a more dependable inspection workflow and a more useful output for owners and operators.
Why this case matters for the Brazil market
Brazil remains one of the most important wind markets in the world, and growth is still creating pressure on inspection providers to deliver more coverage, more reliability, and faster turnaround. In that environment, scalable blade inspections require more than a drone. They require a system that supports field execution, pilot onboarding, data quality, and decision-ready outputs at fleet scale.
This case study shows how ArthWind and Clobotics approached that challenge in practice: use a repeatable inspection platform, keep reliability central, reduce friction in scaling field teams, and produce data that can support real maintenance action. For wind owners, the takeaway is straightforward: the strongest inspection programs are the ones that combine speed, evidence quality, and engineering usefulness in the same workflow.
This case study was shot on location in Paranatama and Sorocaba in Brazil, with additional interviews from our Seattle office in the US.
