Boiler Inspection Robot: Gecko Crawlers and ABB

In a water-tube boiler, the tubes that carry water are heated inside the furnace itself, and over the years they wear thin. Checking them used to mean shutting the boiler down and building scaffolding inside it, or hanging workers from ropes, so that people could take ultrasonic thickness readings by hand. A boiler inspection robot climbs the tube walls on magnetic wheels and takes those readings itself. This post starts with the explosions that created boiler inspection and the years of checking tubes by hand, then follows Gecko Robotics from a student robot at a power plant to the crawlers, drones and robot dogs working in plants in 2026, and ends with ABB's role in boiler plants and what comes next.

A Heine water-tube boiler at the Shreveport Water Works Museum in Louisiana. Photo: Michael Barera / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How boiler explosions created the inspector's job

Boiler inspection grew out of explosions. When the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company was founded on 30 June 1866, catastrophic boiler explosions were happening about once every four days, and the company offered inspections backed by a guarantee against loss and property damage. On 20 March 1905 the old boiler of the R. B. Grover shoe factory in Brockton, Massachusetts, exploded and shot up through three floors and the roof, killing 58 people and injuring 150. Inspectors found a crack in one seam of the boiler, which dated from 1890. Massachusetts passed a law on the operation and inspection of steam boilers in 1907.

A house in Brockton, Massachusetts, more than 200 feet from the Grover shoe factory, knocked off its foundations by the factory's boiler in March 1905. Photo: History of the Brockton Relief Fund via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

National rules followed. The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, created after public outcry over the Massachusetts explosions, was issued in 1914 and published in 1915. Because independent inspectors read the rules in different ways, the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors was formed in 1919. Inside large boilers, the checks were still done by people. Crews built scaffolding or hung from ropes and took ultrasonic thickness readings at chosen spots on the tubes. Flyability, which sells inspection drones, says the scaffolding alone can add several days of downtime and cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.

Joseph G. Branch, chief inspector of boilers in St. Louis, in 1904. Photo: The International Steam Engineer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first boiler climbing robot we found came out of a college project. In 2010 the managers of the Scrubgrass Generating Plant, 22 miles from Grove City College, needed a better way to inspect two boilers in which hot sand was eating away at the tubes. Over three years, three groups of students built prototypes of a robot that used magnetic wheels to climb and take ultrasonic readings inside the boilers, and the college donated the finished robot to the plant, which used it for years. Jake Loosararian turned the project into a company, cofounding Gecko Robotics in May 2013, the month he graduated. It joined Y Combinator the same year.

The Scrubgrass power plant, which burns waste coal, seen from the air in 2025. Photo: Designism / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Crawlers, drones and robot dogs in power plants in 2026

Gecko's crawlers now work well beyond that first plant. At American Bituminous Power's 80 MW Grant Town plant in West Virginia, which burns coal refuse, four robots run by five or six people measured wall thickness across 100 percent of the surface inside the boiler's combustor, and Gecko says the job was done during a five-day planned outage. The analysis produced 28 million data points with an eight-hour turnaround. The plant manager said manual ultrasonic readings at chosen spots could not match that density. In October 2026 the US Navy raised Gecko's maintenance contract from $54 million to up to $300 million, for drones, wall-climbing robots and fixed sensors that check its ships.

The boiler house of the Chester Station power plant on the Delaware River, with doors in front of the steam tubes. Photo: Jack Boucher, HAER / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots are also going where people used to climb. Flyability's Elios 3 drone flies inside boilers in a protective cage, so it can bump into tubes and keep flying, and the company says skipping scaffolding can cut the cost of a boiler inspection by as much as 90 percent in some cases. On 8 October 2026 AI4RVI launched Edgevision, a camera system for looking inside boiler and heat exchanger tubes, with a camera head under 25 mm wide on a 30 m push cable and onboard AI that flags anomalies. In South Korea, Korea Western Power put a robot dog called Geumbok, a Boston Dynamics Spot carrying ultrasound, thermal, lidar and gas sensors, into service at its Gimpo plant in August.

A Flyability Elios 2 caged inspection drone on display at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, 2025. Photo: ZLEA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make boiler crawlers or inspection drones, and we found no ABB robot inspecting a boiler. Its ties to boilers run through history and plant control. Combustion Engineering, a US company that built boilers for coal and oil power plants, became a wholly owned ABB subsidiary in 1990; ABB merged its power business with Alstom's in 1999, and Alstom bought the boiler business in 2000. Today ABB's Symphony Plus automation system controls boilers and their auxiliaries, for example at Vietnam's Vinh Tan 4 coal plant and its 600 MW extension, where ABB won a repeat order in 2016. ABB's own robotic inspection product, the 3DQI cell, is built for checking parts in factories.

ABB's 3D Quality Inspection (3DQI) cell scanning a metal part. Photo: ABB

What comes next for boiler inspection robots

Plants are getting more readings, and getting them sooner. Grant Town got its data and reports back "within a 24-hour period, if not less", and it had turned to robots after forced outages in 2020. Flyability now sells an ultrasonic thickness payload for its Elios 3, so drones can take some of the measurements crawlers take. In Korea, Korea Western Power is considering more robot dogs, and Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power has decided to buy four more units of Prime, a robot that scouts underground pipes for cracks before workers go in.

A Boston Dynamics Spot robot on a forest path, 2023. Korea Western Power's Geumbok is built on the same robot. Photo: Jonte / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB robots could fit on the manufacturing side, as a possibility. Its 3DQI cell uses a robot-carried white light sensor to scan parts to an accuracy below 100 micrometres, ten times faster than a coordinate measuring machine, and ABB pitches it to heavy machinery makers among others. Its GoFa cobot with the Ultra Accuracy option is aimed at precision quality checks in metrology and at metal fabrication. A boiler maker could use cells like these to check burner or tube parts before they ship. Programs for such cells are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio.

A GoFa cobot with ABB's Ultra Accuracy option, here fitted with a measuring probe. Photo: ABB

The limits are still real. Korea's power plant robots mostly act as eyes and ears: tightening bolts and welding pipes still need people, robot dogs run for one to two hours between charges, and radio links often drop inside the plant. Each Geumbok costs more than 2 billion won, and Grant Town's four robots needed five or six people to run them. Repair welding is one place where cobots might help, and ABB sells GoFa for welding with lead-through programming. Households feel the benefit indirectly, through fewer forced outages at the plants that supply their electricity. For a related job, see our post on oil and gas inspection robots.

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com