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.”
Sign up for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the annual Disruptor 50 list, offering a closer look at list-making companies and their innovative founders.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin, measuring just 8.9 millimeters when closed and 4.2 millimeters when unfolded.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Samsung on Wednesday launched three new folding smartphones — including thinner top-end devices and a cheaper version of its flip phone — as the tech giant looks to entice buyers to make the switch to foldables.
The main new additions to Samsung’s foldable phone range are the Galaxy Z Fold 7, which folds like a book, and the Galaxy Z Flip 7, which takes on the form of the classic clamshell-style flip phones. Samsung also announced a cheaper version of its latest flip phone, the Galaxy Z Flip 7 SE.
The South Korean consumer electronics giant is refreshing its foldable phone lineup at a time when the company faces increased competition from Chinese rivals, such as Honor and Oppo. Last week, Honor — which spun off from Chinese tech giant Huawei in 2020 — launched the new ultra-thin Magic V5 folding phone, while Oppo introduced its own slim foldable device, the Find N5, earlier this year.
Samsung’s share of the global foldable phone market slipped to 45% in 2024 from 54% a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. China also accounts for a significant share of the foldables market — although 17.2 million of these devices were sold last year globally, this drops to 9.4 million when excluding mainland China.
Thinner and bigger — but there’s a catch
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin at a thickness of 8.9 millimeters (0.35 inches) closed and only 4.2 millimeters open. It’s also much lighter than its predecessor, weighing 215 grams (7.62 ounces). These stats put the phone on par with both Honor’s Magic V5 and the Oppo Find N5.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
The new Fold device has a 6.5-inch cover screen and an 8-inch main display when opened, making it bigger than its predecessor.
It’s also decked out with premium new cameras, featuring a 200-megapixel main lens, as well as a 10-megapixel telephoto sensor, 12-megapixel ultra-wide and two 10-megapixel front cameras on both the cover screen and on the main display.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin, measuring just 8.9 millimeters when closed and 4.2 millimeters when unfolded.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Samsung’s new Fold generation is, nevertheless, much more limited than other devices in the market when it comes to battery capacity. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has a 4,400 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery — far less than the 6,100 mAh power pack in Honor’s Magic V5’s or the Oppo Find N5’s 5,600 mAh battery.
Samsung says its device is capable of 24 hours of video playback.
The Galaxy Z Fold 7 will retail in the U.K. at a starting price of £1,799 ($2,434).
Cheaper flip phone
The Galaxy Z Flip 7 has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display when opened.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 7 is also thinner than its predecessor, coming in at 6.5 millimeters when opened flat. By contrast, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a depth of 6.9 millimeters when unfolded.
The new phone has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display. It comes with a 50-megapixel main camera and 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor on the back and a 10-megapixel lens on the main display.
It also has a bigger 4,300 mAh battery, which Samsung says supports 31 hours of video playtime on a single charge.
In addition to Flip 7, Samsung is also introducing a cheaper version of the phone, called the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE, which is slightly smaller and thicker than its more premium counterpart.
The Galaxy Z Flip 7 will retail from £1,049 in the U.K., while the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE starts at £849.
AI fashion tips
Samsung also talked up the Galaxy Z Fold and Flip 7’s artificial intelligence capabilities. For the last two years, the company has used Google’s Gemini language model to power much of its AI features — and this year is no different.
Both devices use Samsung and Qualcomm’s custom-made Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip, which is designed to enable more AI processing on-device as opposed to in the cloud.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
It also has new AI-powered camera features, including one that automatically suggests people and objects to erase from photos — for example, if you’ve been photobombed by someone — and an audio eraser tool that proactively detects and removes unwanted background noise from videos.
The Galaxy Z Flip 7, meanwhile, lets you pull up Google’s AI assistant app, Gemini Live, on top of the camera app when taking a live video of yourself. Samsung says one use case this offers is the ability to ask the AI for tips on the outfit you’re wearing.
Sheng Win Chow, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said that physical design alone won’t be enough to convince users to convert to foldable phones from the touchscreen slabs we’re all used to.
“Lasting leadership depends on redefining what foldables do, not just how they look,” he said in an emailed note. “The next wave of competition will come from software — how vendors use the foldable form factor to deliver truly differentiated experiences.”
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike