This week, ARA Lab and AIR Corp completed one of our most significant field deployments to date: sending our magnetic climbing robots to inspect two of the most challenging steel structures at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia: a 260-foot gantry and a 100-foot vacuum sphere.
At the center of this deployment is a robot we're formally introducing today: Spidey.
Spidey is AIR Corp's compact, agile climbing robot engineered for one purpose: reaching the places human inspectors cannot, or should not, go.
Built around magnetic wheel adhesion technology, Spidey clings to steel surfaces across every orientation: vertical, angled, curved, and fully inverted. Spidey navigates complex structural geometries with the kind of reliability that critical infrastructure demands. It carries an onboard camera for real-time visual inspection, streaming live data as it traverses surfaces that haven't been closely examined in years.
Small enough to deploy rapidly. Tough enough to perform on heavily rusted, weathered steel. Precise enough for NASA.
From August 4–8, 2025, our team deployed Spidey alongside our larger robot, Iron Man across three structures at NASA Langley:
The gantry presented some of the most demanding traversal challenges we've faced in field conditions. Spidey executed vertical climbs, flat-to-angle transitions, and fully inverted traversal across its steel frame. It navigated edge travel along I-beams and conducted continuous visual inspection via its onboard camera, performing reliably even on surfaces marked by decades of rust and weathering.
Inspecting a large-diameter curved pressure vessel is a problem that has no good manual solution. Spidey climbed from a cylindrical pipe base and traversed the full spherical surface, demonstrating its abilities across compound curvatures.
The NASA field trials represent a critical milestone in AIR Corp's broader roadmap. With InfraGuard, our AI-powered inspection software, Spidey's sensor data feeds directly into a 3D digital twin, enabling structural health tracking over time, automated defect mapping, and AI-generated condition reports for inspectors and engineers.
We are actively expanding deployments across bridge, dam, and industrial infrastructure, and we are in active conversations with partners across civil engineering, defense, and research sectors.
If you'd like to discuss how AIR Corp's platform can support your infrastructure inspection program, contact us.