Need to get familiar with the inspection robotics market?

Inspection robotics is moving from pilot projects to real budgets, and governments are among the first to pay.

We've found a lot of interesting signals. For example, in March 2026, the US Navy gave Gecko Robotics a five-year, $71M contract to inspect 18 warships with its wall-climbing robots. In December 2025, the FCC put all new foreign-made drone models on its national security list, so they can no longer get approval for sale in the US. And in October 2026, Beam Global agreed to buy ScoutDI, a Norwegian maker of drones that inspect tanks and cargo holds, with plans to build them in the US. Buyers are paying for robotic inspection, and they care more and more about where the robots come from.

In this section, we look at which assets owners hand to robots first, why defense and energy buyers moved early, and what the push for locally built hardware means for startups.

Most industrial inspection still means scaffolding, rope access or a person climbing into a confined space. It's slow, it's dangerous, and it often forces a plant to shut down.

We compare six types of inspection robot companies, from drones and climbing crawlers to pipe, underwater and legged robots, plus the software that reads their data. Their buyers include refineries, utilities, navies, water companies and testing firms. For each, we rank the pains that matter most, like downtime during inspections, workers sent into tanks, and the long gaps between manual checks.

This shows which inspections an asset owner will pay a robot to do first, and which ones still need a certified inspector on site.

Robot sales, monthly rentals, inspections priced per asset, software subscriptions and multi-year contracts with asset owners: inspection robotics companies get paid in very different ways.

We line up each model against who pays for it and what it costs to run. Selling hardware brings cash upfront but little repeat revenue. Running inspections as a service brings bigger contracts, but the company pays for crews, travel and robot repairs. Software that tracks asset health can earn recurring fees, yet it only works if robot data keeps coming in.

You'll see which models keep their margins once field crews and robot upkeep are counted, and which ones turn into a testing contractor with expensive gear.

Inspection robotics doesn't grow on enthusiasm. It grows when a few concrete forces line up, and we go through them here.

Some are obvious: aging bridges, pipelines and power plants, a shortage of certified inspectors, and stricter rules for work at height and in confined spaces. Others feed each other. Every scan adds to an asset's history, which makes the next inspection more useful. Better data lets owners plan repairs instead of reacting to failures. And once a robot is approved on one site, the same owner often rolls it out across its other sites.

Before building or investing, you should know what makes an asset owner trust robot data enough to sign off on a repair, or to skip one.

ANYbotics and Flyability are the names many people know in inspection robotics, but they cover only part of the market.

A lot of the most interesting work happens where nobody looks. Some send crawlers into sewer pipes for city water departments. Others inspect storage tanks while they're still full, scan wind turbine blades, or check ship hulls underwater without a diver.

They're hard to spot because they sell to a few plant managers and testing firms, often under strict confidentiality. Many also deliver their work through a testing contractor, so the asset owner sees the report, not the robot's brand.

Below, you'll find the market grids and ecosystem maps we've built to show which assets each company inspects, with which robot, and where new players are getting in.

Percepto, Eddyfi Technologies, Square Robot… a few inspection robotics companies already work on real sites for paying customers.

Percepto runs drones that live in a box on industrial sites and fly inspections on a schedule. Eddyfi Technologies sells crawlers and testing tools to the inspection firms that already do the work. Square Robot inspects fuel storage tanks from the inside, without draining them. Each found a clear job, though none has yet shown one approach that works for every kind of asset.

We'll look at how these teams picked one type of asset, got inspectors and owners to accept their data, and grew from one site to many.