Contact Robots Deliver Subsurface Data
UAS product lead at Valmont Industries on scaling drone autonomy in industrial inspection
The real distinction is contact data versus stand off data. Gecko is built to press a sensor onto steel and read what is happening inside the material, not just what the outside looks like. Its wall crawling robots use phased array ultrasound and other sensors on tank walls, pipes, ship hulls, and boilers, then turn that scan into thickness maps and risk models. By contrast, the drone systems used in this workflow are strongest at fast visual, thermal, LiDAR, and point thickness checks across hard to reach areas, but not dense subsurface mapping over large steel surfaces.
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Gecko’s advantage comes from physical contact and scan density. Its magnetic TOKA robots crawl directly on ferrous assets and collect millions of data points per hour, far more than manual spot checks, which lets operators find hidden corrosion and wall loss before deciding where to repair.
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Industrial drones already do some contact NDT, but in a narrower way. Voliro and Flyability both offer UT payloads for thickness measurement, which is useful for getting readings in hot, elevated, or confined areas without scaffolding or rope access. That is different from phased array scanning, which produces a richer picture of subsurface conditions.
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In practice the tools chain together. A drone finds where to look, builds the 3D model, and screens broad areas quickly. A crawler then goes onto the exact suspect surface to do high resolution NDT. That division of labor also shows up elsewhere in this market, where drone operators describe crawlers as the deeper scan tool rather than a replacement.
The next step is a mixed robot inspection stack. Broad aerial coverage will keep getting cheaper and more autonomous, while contact robots will handle the high consequence measurements that require touch. The winning platforms will connect the two, so an operator can move from an aerial alert to a crawler scan and then straight into a repair decision inside one workflow.