Maintenance is an essential step to keeping buildings in a healthy state for years. Performing it manually, however, won’t be that easy as it means a great deal of manpower and funds. The process can also be slow, dangerous, and inaccurate. That is what Gecko Robotics is trying to solve as a new innovation in the said industry.
The company was founded by Jake Loosararian, who pursued his idea of building a wall-climbing robot after witnessing firsthand how costly and inconvenient industrial infrastructure failures can be. Now, the company’s technology covers a wide range of applications in the infra industry, including determining wall thinning and corrosion in power broilers, pipes, walls, and more. Making the robots capable of flexibly handling such tasks are their magnificent capabilities. These features allow them to drive on piping down up to 6 inches in diameter, cover up to 30 square feet per minute, and inspect surfaces up to 275-degree F. Even more, they perform non-destructive inspections on tanks, boilers, scrubbers, piping, and more.
The most advanced robot to date of Gecko Robotics is the Toka Flex that can find and collect the critical inspection data you need to make preventative and predictive maintenance decisions. The climbing robots can collect 1000x more information with continuous data capture at speeds an average of 10x faster than previous methods.
The company also introduced the Rapid Ultrasonic Gridding (RUG) robot-enabled inspection method that can also produce helpful information through thickness grid maps. Just like the Toka Series robots, RUG can make things faster and will effectively identify areas where corrosion and other damage mechanisms have caused wall-thinning.
Moreover, the inspection data is intuitively presented in 2D & 3D within the company’s cloud-based organizer, making things easier for users. This can make the process easier for businesses looking for ways to address their infra problems in a short period.
This technology from Gecko Robotics is currently under expansion after the company announced a $73 million raise meant for its deployment and development. The round was led by XN LP and participated by Founders Fund, Drive Capital, Snowpoint Ventures, Joe Lonsdale, Mark Cuban, and Gokul Rajaram.
“Gecko’s unique combination of robotics, software, and AI radically improves the ability to inspect, protect, and efficiently maintain critical infrastructure,” said Tim Brown, partner at XN. “We are excited to partner with Jake and Troy as they extend Gecko’s powerful technology into new geographies and industries, helping customers collect and make sense of physical data to optimize the safety and performance of their assets.”
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