Can wall crawling robots help solve our infrastructure problems?

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Collapsing bridges, crumbling aqueducts, and corroding highways: Infrastructure is big (and increasingly urgent) news in the U.S. A new class of robots and inspection drones from a variety of vendors are beginning to scale structures and perform acrobatic flybys to discern the real state of affairs.

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With federal dollars for infrastructure increasing, the technology could have additional public sector applications. But how big a difference can robots make? Is it too little too late for long-overlooked infrastructure problems? And is the regulation of autonomous systems keeping pace with the technology?

To answer these questions and more, I connected with Jake Loosararian, CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics, which leverages robotics as a service to perform industrial inspections in critical industries such as power, oil and gas, and defense. Gecko's wall-crawling robots scale along industrial assets inspecting for damage while collecting 1000x more data points than traditional inspection methods at 10x the speed. They are furnished with cameras and sensors to detect corrosion, pitting, cracking, blistering, or laminations, and they encompass an impressive intersection of technologies, including robotics, AI, and machine vision.

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