Bacardi hires robotic dog to detect ethanol leaks
Aberfeldy owner Bacardi is exploring whether advanced robotics could help identify small but potentially expensive ethanol leaks in ageing warehouses.
In a first for the Scotch whisky industry, Bacardi is trialling the use of a robotic sensing kit, which resembles a dog, at its John Dewar & Sons maturation site near Glasgow.
The initiative is supported by the Scotch Whisky Research Institute (SWRI), and has been developed by The National Manufacturing Institute Scotland (NMIS) at its Digital Process Manufacturing Centre (DPMC) in Irvine.
The system uses a sensor, held by a 3D-printed arm created by NMIS engineers, to detect ethanol vapour levels as the robot follows a defined path through the warehouse. As part of the collaboration, Bacardi helped design the experiment and led baseline testing ahead of the trial.
The early-stage trial explores how autonomous inspection could be applied across multiple industries – from whisky to chemicals and energy. While the focus of this trial is on whisky casks, the same sensing approach could also help improve efficiency on other routine inspection tasks in different manufacturing environments.
Angus Holmes, whisky category director at Bacardi, said: “Craftmanship and heritage remains at the heart of our production of Dewar’s blended Scotch whisky and our portfolio of single malts, but there is also great potential for innovation and technology to support the industry to become more efficient and data-driven.
“We’re proud to be playing our part to pioneer this new technology in the whisky industry and look forward to progressing from these trials to developing a live system that can be used at our sites in the future.”
He added: “The team loved having the robot dog around so much we gave him his own Bacardi name, Royal Bark-la, in homage to our Royal Brackla single malt.”
Andrew Hamilton, head of the DPMC, said: “Our aim here is to validate our own sensing kit and see whether robots can take on this type of inspection work. The early results are promising, and it shows how manufacturing technologies being developed in Scotland are relevant across many sectors including the whisky industry. It’s been fantastic to work with Bacardi on this – a great example of a company embracing and contributing to innovative new approaches for the industry.”
In 2021, Rocco, a working Cocker Spaniel, was used to identify imperfections in whisky casks at the Grant’s Whisky Distillery in Girvan, Ayrshire.
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