Robots are getting good at the jobs humans hate inspecting
Inspection robots are being deployed in industrial plants, on ships and in other hazardous environments.
That produces a very different set of robot forms from the ones that dominate attention. In inspection, the body follows the environment. Quadrupeds fit industrial sites with stairs, rough ground, and mixed indoor-outdoor terrain. ANYbotics and Boston Dynamics sit in that lane. They are built to patrol, scan, and return usable data from places that are awkward or risky for people to cover repeatedly. ANYbotics is already positioned around autonomous inspection in hazardous industrial environments.
Gecko Robotics builds wall-climbing systems to inspect hulls, welds, tanks and other surfaces. In March, Gecko announced a U.S. Navy contract with a ceiling of $71 million for robotic inspection and maintenance work across Pacific Fleet ships.
Saipem said in March that their FlatFish autonomous underwater drone completed a Petrobras test campaign and moved into the final stage of the project, with the system designed for autonomous inspection of subsea structures and pipelines at depths of up to 3,000 metres. DroneQ is another useful case. Its recent offshore collaboration with Mark Offshore is built around a vessel that supports subsea inspection, survey work, ROV operations, magnetic crawler robots, and drone inspection in one stack.
Inspection systems also cover subsea sites, confined industrial environments, and fixed measurement and quality-control tasks.
Gecko Robotics secured a U.S. Navy contract for robotic ship inspection and maintenance
CHASING raised a Series C to expand underwater robotics
EyeROV raised pre-Series A funding for underwater systems
Armatrix raised funding for snake-like industrial inspection robots
Dronus raised financing for autonomous drone infrastructure
Saipem tested FlatFish for offshore inspection with Petrobras Source
DroneQ Robotics and Mark Offshore formed an offshore inspection collaboration
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