Drones for Screening, Crawlers for Diagnosis

The real split here is between screening tools and diagnosis tools. Gecko is built to press a sensor onto steel and pull rich subsurface data from a specific spot, while drones are built to move quickly around an asset, capture images, heat signatures, LiDAR, and in some cases basic thickness readings. In practice, operators use drones to find where something looks wrong, then send a contact robot to inspect that area in much greater detail.

• Gecko’s core job is contact inspection on ferrous infrastructure. Its wall crawling robots attach to metal surfaces and feed inspection data into digital models for assets like plants, shipyards, and other critical infrastructure. That is much closer to a robotic NDT technician than to an aerial camera platform.
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• Inspection drones win on coverage and access. In the field, teams use DJI, Skydio, Elios, and Voliro for visual, thermal, LiDAR, confined space, and some ultrasonic thickness work. Elios 3 and Voliro both now support UT thickness measurement, but that is still different from a crawler doing phased array scans over steel surfaces.
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• The workflow is increasingly sequential, not competitive. A drone can scan a tower, flare stack, boiler, or confined space without scaffolding and generate a map or 3D model. A crawler then goes to the exact suspect area where deeper metal loss, cracking, or weld issues need to be measured with higher confidence.
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This pushes the market toward mixed robotic inspection stacks. The winners are likely to be vendors that fit cleanly into that handoff, fast aerial coverage first, precise contact NDT second, with both feeding the same maintenance workflow and digital asset record.