AUTOMATING DIRTY AND DANGEROUS WORK

ROBOTS ARE GOING WHERE EVEN ROBOTS MIGHT FEAR TO TREAD.

THERE’S A long history of robots taking jobs that humans resent, resist, or outright fear. But a new crop of bots is tackling tasks that even machines might calculate to be out of their theoretical comfort zones.

Gecko Robotics has been deploying its devices to inspect intercontinental ballistic missile silos, fuel-storage tanks, and warships. Nearthlab provides a software platform that enables drones to perform up-close checkups on wind turbines and other critical infrastructures. Stratom is developing robots to service and refuel aircraft on flight lines that may be near the front lines in war zones. And Doodle Labs’ radio gear helps drones flown by Ukraine’s armed forces stay in touch with human operators and has kept firefighters in contact with each other in rural California during wildfire season.

The bots that are heading toward danger look very different from attentiongrabbing humanoid robots designed to work alongside people. Hardware with nonhumanoid body parts may not capture the public imagination as easily, but those devices can go to work where people won’t fit or wouldn’t want to try, even after donning protective gear.

“If you look at the history of robots, they traditionally started out as the fixed robots you see on the assembly line,” says Tim Shea, senior analyst at ARC Advisory Group. “The incorporation of mobility has opened up the application envelope.” The addition of wheels, tank treads, and (yes) even legs in recent years has unbolted robots and taken them beyond factories. Bots that use wings and rotors to move, Shea points out, also require special permission slips from the Federal Aviation Administration, which has eluded many drone vendors until the last few years. But demand for commercial hardware and services from hazardous-duty robotics is taking off, following years of pathfinding work that included developing software and gathering data to make them usable in tight spots.

The ultimate payoff waiting for robotics companies—like other firms that need to ingest and process large amounts of customer information before they can do their jobs—is taking all that data and making effective and responsible use of it. As

Shea puts it: “The robot has really become a mobile data platform.” —Rob Pegoraro