Gecko Robotics has begun deploying a new wall-climbing inspection robot called Raptor across energy facilities operated by Adnoc, Abu Dhabi's state oil company, as Gulf producers look to recover faster from recent attacks on their infrastructure. The Pittsburgh-based company says Raptor moves three to five times faster than its predecessor and cuts the cost of collecting inspection data by a factor of 50, according to The National.
The rollout comes as Gecko separately finalizes a $300 million inspection contract with the US Navy and negotiates a parallel agreement with Adnoc Onshore, extending a business that already runs tens of climbing robots a day across the region.
How does a robot climb an oil tank or a ship hull?
Raptor sticks to steel surfaces the way Gecko's earlier Komodo system does, using magnetic or suction-based tracks that let it crawl across vertical tanks, flight decks and hull plating. What has changed is the sensing payload. The robot carries acoustic sensors that send sound waves through a surface to measure wall thickness and flag corrosion, cracks or metal loss, without stripping paint or shutting the asset down.
As it moves, Raptor logs millions of data points and timestamps each one against its exact position on the structure. That turns a walk-around inspection into a dense digital map, something a two-person crew with handheld gauges could not produce at comparable resolution or speed. Gecko CEO Jake Loosararian put the gains this way: "Raptor allows for a 50x reduction in the cost of data collection, while also increasing the fidelity by roughly the same order of magnitude."
Why is this happening in the Gulf right now?
The timing is tied to the war between Israel and Iran, which has left Gulf producers newly worried about strikes on refineries, pipelines and storage terminals. When a facility is damaged, operators need to know within hours, not weeks, which sections of steel are safe to keep running and which need repair before they fail. Loosararian framed the robot's value in exactly those terms, saying Gecko's job is to understand what damage has occurred "so that it increases how quickly you can get assets back up and running."
Adnoc is the first confirmed Gulf customer, and Gecko is now negotiating a broader agreement with Adnoc Onshore to extend robotic monitoring across more of its critical infrastructure. The company is also weighing local manufacturing in the UAE, which would let it test and build equipment closer to the facilities it serves rather than shipping robots from the US. UAE officials say the push is feeding a wider local interest in robotics, alongside parallel efforts in drone manufacturing and 3D printing.
What does this mean beyond the Gulf?
Gecko's business model rests on selling inspection as a recurring service rather than a one-time robot sale, billing customers for the data and the maintenance plans it generates. That model scaled quickly enough in the US that the Navy expanded an initial $71 million contract to $300 million within six months, covering hull, ballast tank and flight deck inspections across the fleet.
Extending that approach to commercial energy infrastructure puts Gecko in competition with traditional inspection contractors that rely on human crews with ultrasonic wands and rope access teams, a slower and more labor-intensive process. If Raptor's cost and speed claims hold up under independent audit, wall-climbing robots could become a standard tool for any operator managing large steel structures in conflict-adjacent regions, not just oil producers.