"If you want to be rich, first build roads" This domestic phrase is slippery, and now it has crossed the ocean to the United States, and the United States, as a developed country, has found that it not only wants to build roads to get rich, but also has to continue to "build" roads after getting rich.
On January 28, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden appeared in Pittsburgh to publicize the Infrastructure Development Act. Two months ago he signed the $2.2 trillion Infrastructure Bill, the largest infrastructure bill in the United States in half a century.
Just hours before Biden reached Pittsburgh, the Forbes Avenue Bridge in Pittsburgh suddenly collapsed, injuring 10 people as five buses passed through with a public bus. At the same time, a natural gas pipeline passing through the bridge here was cut off, resulting in a violent gas leak.
In January 2022, the forbes Avenue Bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed| the Associated Press website
At the scene of the accident, the President of the United States looked at the collapsed bridge and lamented that "the United States has been far behind in infrastructure for many years", and that $1.6 billion of the $1 trillion bill will be used to maintain the Bridge in Pennsylvania.
The Forbes Avenue Bridge is just one microcosm of america's aging infrastructure.
Recently, the American Society of Civil Engineers released its latest U.S. Infrastructure Report Card, with all categories ranging from roads and hazardous waste to broadband and energy at the "C-" level. Like the collapsed Pittsburgh City Bridge, if it has undergone sufficient prior maintenance testing, accidents can be avoided.
Historically, the use of manual inspection infrastructure has been inefficient, inaccurate, and dangerous, and in many cases even impossible to detect problems.
Gecko Robotics, a local entrepreneurial team in Pittsburgh, has a better solution — using robots instead of humans to overhaul the infrastructure.
Gecko's TOKA intelligent robot can climb the walls of any pipe and other important industrial structure in the factory, use technology such as ultrasound to find problems in it, and visualize it in software in 2D and 3D. This allows the client to have a clear understanding of the situation at the target facility, anticipate existing problems in advance and plan solutions.
Gecko Robotics is changing the traditional way industrial assets are quality inspected. Historically, manual inspections have only covered about 3-5% of all facilities, while Gecko's latest TOKA 4 robot provides nearly 99% coverage.
This month, Gecko Robotics raised $73.3 million in a Series C funding round, and Peter Till's Founder's Fund continues to follow suit. To date, the company has raised $122 million in financing.
"Collecting and producing useful physical data to protect the most critical infrastructure of contemporary civilization" appears in the most prominent position on the Gecko Robotics website.
The "gecko" came out of the mountain
In 2012, Jake Loosararian, who studied electrical engineering at Grove City College, asked the manager a question: "Why do you trust the infrastructure around you?"
Electricity production could have been forced to stop because of constant failures in industrial infrastructure, when the plant was on the verge of shutting down and facing millions of dollars in losses every day if it was shut down.
Jake decided to help the factory, and he wanted to build a wall-climbing robot to solve the puzzle of the century. Meanwhile, Orion Correa, a fellow electrical major, worked with him on a boiler safety inspection project, backed by ventureLab, an on-campus business incubator, and a $10,000 seed round from Ben Franklin Technology.
Jake Loosararian and Troy Demmer, the two founders of Gecko Robotics, | gecko Robotics
A passion for problem solving and developing robotics led Jake to found Gecko Robotics in his fourth year of college in May 2013. The company moved to Pittsburgh in 2015. In November, Gecko Robotics received a seed round of $120,000 from Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC).
In 2018, Gecko Robotics received a $7 million Series A funding round led by Founders Fund, a prominent venture capital firm in California. Since then, the team's revenue and size have grown rapidly and have grown 5-fold. In 2019, Gecko Robotics has grown from 10 to 60 employees. Today, Gecko Robotics employs more than 130 people.
Gecko's Gecko robot is able to obtain more data than traditional inspections, and at the heart of its self-developed Rapid Ultrasound Griding (RUG) technology is its own rapid ultrasonic grid (RUG) technology – through several ultrasonic sensors equipped with the robot, the robot performs ultrasonic inspection of key assets such as oil tanks or boilers, and generates a thickness grid map through RUG to identify areas where the wall layer is thinned by corrosion and other damage mechanisms.
Gecko Robotics' TOKA Robotics | the Official Website of Gecko Robotics
Gecko robots collect 1,000 times more data than traditional handheld methods and detect an average of 10 times faster. Mesh sizes range from 12" x 12" (0.3 x 0.3m) to 0.04" x 0.04" (1x1mm) for sufficient accuracy. All inspection data is presented in the Cloud Manager in an intuitive visual form of 2D and 3D – the "thickness mesh map".
The "Thickness Filter" can quickly identify areas of high wear, as well as any areas that may be thinned by corrosion or other environmental influences, and the data differences detected allow customers to easily calculate the erosion rate to determine the quality of their industrial assets.
In terms of products, Gecko Robotics mainly launches the TOKA series of wall-climbing robots with sensors, which carry out non-destructive testing of infrastructure such as tanks, boilers, scrubbers, pipelines, etc.
The different models of the robots correspond to different specifications and suitable facilities, such as the TOKA 3 model with 8 sensors suitable for medium-sized pipes and high-temperature surfaces, while the TOKA 4 (GZ) model with 128 sensors is suitable for inspecting large flat surfaces.
The "grid map" scanned using the robot | Gecko Robotics
Traditional infrastructure inspections require scaffolding to be built so that people can get close to investigate mega-facilities, and often, the scaffolding built extends to several floors in the air, which creates an unstable and unsafe working environment for inspectors. Gecko Robotics' approach completely eliminates this hidden danger. High-performance robots replace inspectors, which not only improves the efficiency of nearly a thousand times, but also provides a guarantee for their personal safety.
Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of the company, said: "Gecko robots make the inspection process safer, more efficient and more thorough." "It eliminates the need for people to enter confined spaces during inspections, thereby reducing the risk of injury." At the same time, robots operate in dangerous and demanding environments, and the data collected is provided to professionals to maximize their contribution while keeping them safe from harm.
When handling hazardous chemicals that can be toxic, explosive, or high-pressure, robots minimize the possibility of human exposure to chemicals, greatly improving worker safety.
"Infrastructure" market
In February 2017, a pipe leak occurred on the lower slope of a pulverized coal boiler at the Kentucky plant, and the boiler was brought back online a few days after hiring a well-known traditional ultrasonic testing (UT) company to investigate key areas and take baseline measurements, and less than a month after the first leak, another leak occurred in the same area.
An engineer at the plant called Gecko Robotics for help, and a few hours later two inspectors and a TOKA 3 robot were deployed to the plant to work on the boiler. At the end of the shift, TOKA 3 captured more than 2 million thickness readings, compared to 500 thickness readings from previous manual methods.
Gecko's results reveal a large number of critical areas that require short-term repairs, and the boiler can be reopened after the problem is solved, "Gecko Vision maps can define a clear scope of work," said the senior engineer.
Since March 2017, the Kentucky facility has been working with Gecko Robotics for all four boiler units and other equipment around the plant. The data provided by the robot enables the plant to control the coverage and cost of the repair facility.
Decision-making and overall preventive maintenance at the Kentucky power plant are now more seamless, and data, speed, and forward thinking have helped the plant save millions of dollars.
Gecko's software and website organize and display data in visual thickness maps, as well as downloadable excel documents
"The world needs critical infrastructure to be reliable. Inspection and maintenance is the main path to this result."
According to Biden's $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan released last year, the United States will invest $621 billion over the next eight years to improve transportation infrastructure and repair and update public transportation infrastructure such as highways, bridges, ports, airports, and tracks.
The necessary quality monitoring and maintenance is an important step in maintaining the building in a stable and healthy state for many years. However, traditional manual inspections are not easy, which means a lot of manpower and money consumption, and represents a slow, dangerous, and inaccurate process. That's what Gecko Robotics is trying to solve.
Gecko Robotics' current focus is no longer limited to classic industries such as oil, gas, power and paper, but also has a lot of room for expansion in other industries such as telecommunications and IT infrastructure. While the company didn't specify which industries it could continue to expand its services into, those emerging industries may be where the huge amount of new money it raised in March came in.
Jake revealed that Gecko Robotics is currently focused on supporting the most vulnerable and critical industries in infrastructure, including oil and gas, energy and defense.
"Some of the assets in these industries have been in use for 50 to 60 years, meaning that the workers who operate and maintain these facilities are at greatly increased risk of environmental pollution and injury. As we continue to scale our operations and refine our product offerings, especially after our latest round of funding, we have the opportunity to bring our services to neighbouring industries."
Expanding Gecko Robotics' powerful technology to new regions and industries, with the help of intelligent robots, companies gain data and insights to predict failures before they occur, minimize losses, and perhaps that's the future of sustainability that the global infrastructure industry can foresee.
"Protect today's critical infrastructure and prepare for tomorrow's infrastructure." This is Gecko Robotics' mission statement.