During his participation at NISTM 2025, Connor Crawford, CEO and Co-Founder of Pike Robotics shared relevant details about his company's most advanced development, a robot for tank inspection capable of operating in highly hazardous environments without the need to stop the operation or expose human personnel.
Pike Robotics, a start-up company born in the laboratories of Texas Robotics at UT Austin, was created with the goal of transforming unsafe industrial processes through autonomous robotics. With the initial backing of Phillips 66 and a multidisciplinary team of engineers, it has evolved to become a benchmark in automation applied to the inspection of critical assets.
The company's flagship product is the world's first wall crawler robot certified as Class 1 Division 1, a classification that allows it to operate in explosive atmospheres. This robot is designed specifically to perform internal and external inspections on floating roof tanks, especially in sensitive areas such as rim seals and gauge poles, which require verification to comply with environmental regulations.
Crawford noted that the robot is set up to work inside tanks that still contain toxic vapors, liquid waste and other hazardous conditions, completely eliminating the need for human entry into confined spaces. "We have a way to ensure that all electrical components are completely isolated from flammable vapors, thus avoiding any risk of ignition," he explained during the interview.
By using this tank inspection robot, companies can continue their operations without the need to take tanks out of service, which represents significant time and cost savings.
"Many asset owners approached us during the event, interested in using our technology to avoid outages and protect their equipment."
Crawford noted.
This approach optimizes the resources of the operating companies and opens the door to a more agile inspection model, making it possible to anticipate failures before they become major operational problems.
After obtaining official certification of the robot, the company faces the challenge of scaling up its production capacity. Currently, Pike Robotics is in the early stages of manufacturing and plans to build between 5 and 10 units within the year, in response to the growing interest of the industrial market and companies specialized in inspection services.
Although the initial focus is on storage tanks in the oil and gas industry, the robot's versatility allows its application in other industries with similar risk environments, such as petrochemical, energy or even nuclear.
The proposal of Pike Robotics is in line with a growing trend, which seeks to automate dangerous and repetitive tasks that traditionally depended on human labor in extreme conditions. In this sense, the robot developed by the company marks a before and after in the inspection of industrial infrastructures.
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Source: Inspenet.
