Nexterity's robot aims to automate pipefitting's hardest bolts

Lindsey Elliott, a former engineer and planner at ExxonMobil, has spent years studying how to improve the infrastructure that moves oil, gas, and petrochemicals. She landed on bolts — specifically the ones connecting sections of pipe, known as bolted flange joints. Loosening and tightening them requires hard physical labor and is a source of many pipefitters’ injuries, in an industry that, like many trades, is also short on workers. Elliott said crews are often asked to work 12 hours a day for three months in a row, leaving them exhausted, and that pipefitters she’s spoken with across the U.S. and Canada have repeatedly told her North American pipefitting productivity is notoriously low.

Elliott’s startup, Nexterity — one of the Startup Battlefield 200 companies selected to participate in TechCrunch Disrupt — built a remote-controlled robot to take over that part of the job. It’s the kind of idea that could fundamentally change this blue-collar trade if widely adopted, making workers safer and more productive.

The robot comes in two main pieces that fit around a pipe. Once attached, it’s battery-powered and can slide across the pipe to loosen or tighten four bolts at a time. Nexterity has built several configurations to match different standard pipe sizes, but each is small enough to fit in a Pelican case and be carried by a single worker — a design choice that supports the company’s plan to rent the robots out like construction equipment, deploying them to new sites as needed.

Elliott said the design came out of years of conversations with pipefitters, including members of the Pressure Vessels & Piping Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. “What I learned from the people, the torque dorks per se, is that 80% of our pipes are between two to eight inches in diameter, or what they call NPS2 to NPS8,” she said. “And so when you have that much repeatability, you have a fantastic candidate for automation.” That repeatability extends well beyond oil and gas: Elliott said water and wastewater treatment, food and beverage production, mining, nuclear facilities, and green manufacturing plants all rely on the same kind of piping — part of why she believes the addressable market for the robot is bigger than most people would assume.

Why it matters

A rental robot that automates one of pipefitting’s most injury-prone, labor-intensive tasks could ease a persistent worker shortage in a trade that keeps oil, gas, water, and manufacturing infrastructure running — without requiring facilities to buy specialized equipment outright.