Gecko Robotics | Transforming the Manufacturing Industry | Ed Bryner

They’ve created intelligent robots that climb the walls of power plants, pipelines, and other important industrial structures to look for issues. Historically, human inspections cover approximately 3-5% of the asset. Gecko’s newest robot, the TOKA 4, offers close to 99% coverage.

“Companies are peeking through a keyhole when looking at traditional physical reports,” said JJ Mrkonich, a mechanical engineer at Gecko Robotics. “If any imperfections or wear spots go undetected, it can cause leaks that can raise costs and drop efficiency dramatically,”

With the intelligent robotic solutions that Gecko Robotics is building, companies can get data and insights to predict failures before they happen.

Partnering with Fictiv for Accelerated Development

Since they’re building high-quality robots that need to withstand intense environmental conditions, Gecko needed a manufacturing partner that could help provide reliable parts on an ambitious schedule.

“We needed to get it right the first time to start making the impact that we wanted to make,” said Bryner. “Unfortunately, we had different vendors provide inaccurate quotes and miss deadlines or send subpar parts that we ultimately had to send back. We even blacklisted some of our previous vendors.”After partnering with Fictiv, Gecko Robotics has seen countless changes in how they order and receive parts. With previous vendors, just getting a quote to begin was difficult.

“We’d send in for a quote, and we’d be waiting up to a week to get something back,” said Bryner. “Fictiv’s platform is able to quote almost instantaneously, which allows us to make quicker decisions. Their feedback even helps us evaluate whether or not we need to make a quick change to our design in order to help our robots come to life faster and more effectively.”

Scaling into Production

The partnership between Fictiv and Gecko Robotics has extended beyond just prototype designs as well. Once Bryner and his team decide that a part design will work on more than one of their robotic platforms, they start to scale to production through the Fictiv platform without worry.

“The quality and speed have never lacked, and that’s one of the things we’re really excited about with Fictiv,” Bryner said.

For Dillon Jourde, a mechanical engineer at Gecko, working with Fictiv has changed the way he works.“Our robot is not a simple machine – it has a lot of unique and high tolerance parts,” said Jourde. “Finding a trustworthy partner that can make those parts reliably and quickly has been extremely helpful.”

Building a Better Industry

But for Gecko Robotics, it’s more than just efficiency improvements and cost savings for their customers. Typical inspections require scaffolding to be built in order for humans to scale and report on assets. Often, the scaffolding built extends several stories into the air, which can create an unstable and unsafe environment for human inspectors.

“There are lives that get lost in this industry, whether it’s somebody falling off of scaffolding, or something falling onto them,” said Bryner. “It’s a real problem. With a Gecko Robotics system, we’re able to collect more data, do it safer, and do it faster. That’s really how we’ve started to make an impact on this industry.”

Expanding U.S. Navy Work

Gecko Robotics, the company pioneering the use of AI and robotics to change how organizations build, operate and maintain their most critical infrastructure, announced an expansion of its work with the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet and the continued growth of its partnership with the Columbia-class submarine program. The Navy has increased the use of Gecko on surface ships by 400% in 2024 and has expanded its scope to include aircraft carriers, with the first vessel scheduled for this fall.

The expansion with the $132 billion Columbia-class program represents a continuation of Gecko’s work on the nuclear-powered submarines that was announced last fall, building on the maintenance support for Virginia-class submarines.

“We’re proud to grow our partnership with the Navy around keeping ships in the fight and increasing the pace of production on the Columbia,” said Jake Loosararian, Co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics. “Making sure the brave men and women of the U.S. Navy have the tools they need to perform their vital missions safely and effectively is the perfect example of what our team wakes up every morning focused on.”

According to the Navy data, Gecko is significantly reducing the lead time and work hours associated with maintenance cycles while increasing the availability of data and finding defects missing through traditional methods. For example, for one Navy asset, traditional methods captured less than 100 data points on key vital defense structures while Gecko’s platform captured more than 4.2 million.

Gecko will support the manufacturing and construction process of the Columbia-class nuclear submarines by using advanced robotics to collect an unprecedented level of structural data. The company will be able to help identify and predict problem areas in the build process that could create substantial delays. Gecko will also help the Navy build a digital baseline on critical parts of the program to help predict how the maritime environment will impact the submarine and when in-service maintenance will be required.

Gecko has been deployed across the U.S. Navy surface fleet since 2023 to help decrease maintenance delays and enable better planning. The company will begin work on its first aircraft carrier this fall and utilize their fleet of robots and fixed sensors to gather incredibly granular data on the health of the Navy’s vessels. That data is then fed into Gecko’s AI-powered operations platform, Cantilever, to help substantially reduce growth work, maintenance timelines and help the ships get back to sea faster.

The new deals cement Gecko’s role in building and maintaining critical defense assets that support both national and global security. It also makes the U.S. Navy a pioneer in using the very latest technology to reduce delays and unexpected maintenance for its fleet – a challenge faced by countries around the world.

Gecko is transforming how the world’s most critical organizations build, operate and maintain their critical infrastructure. By combining the predictive power of AI, with the granularity of robotically-collected data layers, Gecko empowers decision making at scale for a more reliable and sustainable future.