Robotics/unmanned systems

Energy Industry Turning to Robotics To Inspect Infrastructure

Gecko Robotics is providing the energy industry with artificial-intelligence-enabled robots to inspect infrastructure and supply massive amounts of data to help predict failures before they occur.

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Credit: Gecko Robotics.

No matter the commodity price, the equipment that produces, moves, and processes crude and natural gas must be maintained.

“Ongoing maintenance is critical,” said Jake Loosararian, cofounder and chief executive officer of Gecko Robotics.

The Pittsburgh-based robotics company he cofounded in 2013 uses artificial-intelligence-enabled robots to gather data on infrastructure, including pipes, pressure vessels, tanks, boilers, and silos, to help determine what could fail or is failing and assist with maintenance.

“We’ve created this proactive way of maintaining critically important—and expensive—infrastructure,” Loosararian said.

“The robot I made in college was to address things that, if they failed, could have a negative impact,” he said.

Doing such inspections traditionally put people in danger, he said. “As I was building my robot, someone fell off a scaffolding and died,” he said.

When Gecko Robotics first started, he said it focused on the power space. But, since then, it has expanded “a fair amount” to work with government agencies such as the US Navy, manufacturing, and oil and gas companies. He listed BP, Chevron, Exxon, Marathon, and Shell among the customers using the machines to inspect the integrity of their infrastructure. The company recently raised $40 million in seed money, with Mark Cuban as a backer.

“We build these machines and platforms to identify integrity and help with assessments related to issues with infrastructure and predicting when things will fail,” he said.

“We’ve found the best way to understand structural integrity, whether it’s pipes or pipelines, digesters, oilers, tanks or silos, the way to identify integrity is through going out to those places and do spot checks with sensors,” he said.

For example, the company has developed a tubing integrity inspector with sensors that can perform inspections safely and a lot faster.

Beyond that, Loosararian said the company does not merely sell a customer a robot but uses its software to analyze the masses of data provided by the robots and artificial intelligence to identify when failures will happen, such as a refinery explosion or pipeline failure.

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