Can cheaper, faster robotics revitalized modern manufacturing and transform the military?
It feels like American industrial and manufacturing landscape has been left behind in the digitalization revolution. But recent changes demonstrated in both Ukraine and a small robot company in Pittsburg may be pointing to the coming revolution.
Gecko is a scrappy robot company founded by a college senior that saw workers spending hours putting up dangerous scaffolding to check and fix pipes in a power plant. What if he could build robots to scale around the pipes and check and fix them? It turns out they could – and it is revolutionizing maintenance in refineries and energy infrastructure across the country. The robots now no longer can crawl and inspect/repair – but they can create new digital maps of a plant’s infrastructure. Inspections are taking orders of magnitude less time. Plants can have their systems remapped instead of relying on out of date diagrams.
It turns out someone else has the same problem: the military. Systems like Gecko allow the navy to build and repair ships faster. Gecko’s small robots reduced nuclear submarine inspection times from 300 hours to just 6 hours. But this revolution is bigger than just repair of existing systems.
The war in Ukraine is now being won not by ‘exquisite’, complex, and exorbitantly expensive weapons systems. Instead, it’s being won by swarms of low-cost drones. Million dollar tanks are being disabled by $200 drones with explosives. Military experts around the world are watching Ukraine and re-thinking everything. Even before the Ukraine war, the US navy was already started the move from big capital ships to cheaper, faster to build modular ships.
Anduril wrote a paper in 2024 that goes a step further. They claim that these low-cost robotics and AI systems are making existing gigantic expensive systems vulnerable and outdated. Further, the complex and hugely expensive 1st world weapon systems cost too much and take too long to make in quantities beyond short wars. What is needed is to establish fast, cheap, commercial manufacturing of these systems that can be built and deployed rapidly. This is leading to a revolution of automated manufacturing.
The future is not going to belong to giant, expensive, monolithic systems – but fast, easy to build, capable systems built in large numbers.