These wall-climbing, AI-powered robots are finding the flaws in ‘D’ grade US infrastructure, from commuter bridges to military hardware
The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge earlier this year and an I-95 overpass in Philadelphia last June weren’t triggered by structural flaws — a runaway, powerless ocean ship and tanker fire were the culprits. But the disasters were the latest examples of an issue seen across the U.S.: trillions of dollars worth of critical — and vulnerable — bridges, roads, dams, factories, plants and machinery that are rapidly aging and in need of repair.
Significant sums of money are being spent to fix the issues, some coming from President Biden’s Infrastructure Act and other legislation, but the way infrastructure is maintained has largely not changed, mostly done slowly by humans or after a significant issue arises like a leak or collapse.
Gecko Robotics, which ranked No. 42 on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, is taking on the nationwide challenge with AI and robots, specifically, its wall-climbing bots that perform inspections on infrastructure and not only identify existing issues but also to try to predict what can be done to avoid future problems.
“When you think about the built world, a lot of concrete, a lot of metal that is, especially in the U.S., 60 to 70 years old; we as a country have a D rating for infrastructure and getting that up to a B is a $4 trillion to $6 trillion problem,” Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “A lot of that is understanding what to fix and then targeting those repairs, and then also ensuring that they don’t continue to make the same mistakes.”
Gecko Robotics’ technology is already being used to monitor “500,000 of the world’s most critical assets,” Loosararian said, which range from oil and gas facilities and pipelines to boilers and tanks at manufacturing facilities.
A focus on military hardware, from subs to aircraft carriers
Gecko robots are increasingly being utilized by the U.S. military. In 2022, the U.S. Air Force awarded Gecko Robotics a contract to help it with the conversion of missile silos. Last year, the U.S. Navy tapped the company to help modernize the manufacturing process of its Columbia-class nuclear submarine program, using Gecko’s robots to conduct inspections of welds.
Gecko Robotics is also working with the Navy to inspect aircraft carriers, which Loosararian demonstrated on CNBC via a demo on the USS Intrepid, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that now serves as a museum in New York City.
He compared the analysis that Gecko Robotics is doing on infrastructure to a CAT scan of a human body, while also creating a digital twin of the scanned object.
Those inspections historically are done by workers, collecting thousands of readings across an aircraft carrier. Gecko Robotics technology can collect upwards of 20 million data points in a tenth of the time, Loosararian said.
“There’s human error, and if you’re hanging off the side of a ship, it’s pretty dangerous too,” he said.
There are also issues related to the timeliness of military hardware construction and readiness of defense assets in an unpredictable world of global threats. For example, Loosararian said China is building ships 232 times faster than the U.S. is, a function of the sheer amount of shipbuilding capacity that China now has in comparison.
“A third of our naval vessels are in drydock right now, and you want them out of drydock or not even in a maintenance cycle,” Loosararian said. “What we’re doing with Lidar and ultrasonic sensors is a health scan, seeing what the damages are and how to fix them, because what we’re trying to do is get these ships from drydock out to the seas patrolling as fast as possible.”
The digital twins being created by Gecko robots also help with the building of future projects, saving not only time but resources and capital.
“It’s not just about how things work day-to-day but also how do you build smarter things,” Loosararian said.” If we can understand what fails in the real world, then we can figure out how to build smarter things in the future.”
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a round table discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Autonomous vehicles and robotics are going to take off in a big way in the years ahead, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“This is going to be the decade of AV [autonomous vehicles], robotics, autonomous machines,” Huang told CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal Thursday at the Viva Tech conference in Paris.
Nvidia plays a significant role in the rollout of driverless vehicles as the U.S. chipmaking giant sells both hardware and software solutions for AVs.
Self-driving cars are being spotted more frequently in the U.S., where Google-owned Waymo is operating robotaxi services in parts of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Meanwhile, a number of Chinese companies including Baidu and Pony.ai are also running their own respective robotaxi fleets.
Europe, on the other hand, is yet to see significant AV adoption — primarily because the regulations are not yet clear enough for self-driving technology companies to get their services off the ground.
However, the technology is beginning to gain more traction. In the U.K., legislation called the Autonomous Vehicles Act has been passed into law, paving the way for self-driving vehicles to arrive on roads by 2026.
Uber on Tuesday announced a partnership with British self-driving car technology firm Wayve to launch trials of fully autonomous rides in the U.K., starting in spring 2026.
If the U.S. continues to impose AI semiconductor restrictions on China, then chipmaker Huawei will take advantage of its position in the world’s second-largest economy, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC Thursday.
“Our technology is a generation ahead of theirs,” Huang told CNBC at the sidelines of the Viva Technology conference in Paris.
However, he warned that: “If the United States doesn’t want to partake, participate in China, Huawei has got China covered, and Huawei has got everybody else covered.”
In the face of U.S. export curbs that restrict Chinese firms from buying advanced semiconductors used in the development of AI, Beijing has focused on nurturing domestic firms such as Huawei in a bid to build its own AI chip ecosystem.
Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei this week told the People’s Daily Newspaper of the governing Communist party that Huawei’s single chip is still behind the U.S. by a generation.
“The United States has exaggerated Huawei’s achievements. Huawei is not that great. We have to work hard to reach their evaluation,” Ren said in comments reported by Reuters.
This is a developing news story and will be updated shortly.
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