Watch: These wall-climbing robots are inspecting roads, bridges and dams across the world

US-based Gecko Robotics offers wall-climbing robots that can perform inspections on infrastructure like roads, bridges and dams. These bots, called Cantilever, can not only identify existing issues but also predict what can be done to avoid problems in the coming days. Here’s a video on how the robots work:

In the video, the CEO and Co-founder of Gecko Robotics, Jake Loosararian, says that these robots can be used to gather health data on physical assets as well as critical infrastructure like power plants, military equipment and manufacturing facilities.
Loosararian explains how the old way of collecting data on these assets at “dangerous heights by hand,” can lead to “catastrophic failures.”

How Gecko robots work and how they can help governments

Loosararian explained that the analysis that Gecko Robotics’ Cantilever does on infrastructure is similar to a CAT scan of a human body. The robots also creates a digital twin of the scanned object.
Traditionally, these inspections are done by workers who collect thousands of readings across physical assests. Meanwhile, Gecko Robotics’ technology can collect more than 20 million data points in a tenth of the time, Loosararian claimed.

The digital analysis of the assets created by Gecko robots also help with the building of upcoming projects and save not only time but resources and capital.
In an interview with CNBC, Loosararian said: “When you think about the built world, a lot of concrete, a lot of metal that is, especially in the US, 60 to 70 years old; we as a country have a D rating for infrastructure and getting that up to a B is a $4 trillion to $6 trillion problem. A lot of that is understanding what to fix and then targeting those repairs, and then also ensuring that they don’t continue to make the same mistakes.”
Gecko Robotics’ technology is already being used to monitor “500,000 of the world’s most critical assets,” which range from oil and gas facilities to pipelines, boilers and tanks at manufacturing facilities, Loosararian continued.

How Gecko Robotics is helping the US military

According to a report by CNBC, the US military is also using the company’s robots. In 2022, the US Air Force signed a contract with Gecko Robotics to help it with the maintainence of missile silos.
The US Navy also used the company’s technology to help modernise the manufacturing process of its Columbia-class nuclear submarine program last year. The US Navy used Gecko’s robots to conduct inspections of its welds.