Questions & Answers

We build autonomous climbing robots that inspect critical energy infrastructure. Our robots navigate complex pipe networks, capturing continuous, high-quality inspection data without scaffolding or shutdowns.

Yes. We recently rebranded from Cortex Robotics to Saro Robotics. Same team, same technology, same mission. Only the name has changed.

Traditional pipe inspection is expensive, dangerous, and incomplete. Scaffolding alone accounts for 50% of inspection costs and often requires shutdowns. Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI) costs Norwegian operators over 1 billion NOK a year. Our robots remove the scaffolding, reduce risk, and capture the data that manual inspection misses.

Three steps. We deploy the robot onto your pipe network in minutes. It navigates the pipes, traversing bends and obstacles while capturing 360° inspection data. We then process that data into actionable reports for condition-based maintenance decisions.

Vertical and horizontal pipes, 90° bends, complex junctions, varying diameters, corroded surfaces, and insulation layers. They rotate 360° for full circumferential coverage and maintain precise sensor positioning throughout.

Most tools only work on straight, clean pipe runs. Our robots are engineered from the ground up for the real conditions of energy facilities, where bends, obstacles, and difficult geometry are the norm.

A shift from time-based to condition-based maintenance. Continuous data means you can predict issues before they become failures, rather than relying on periodic snapshots.

Trondheim, Norway (Sem Sælands vei 1).

Request a demo and our team will walk you through the technical specifications tailored to your infrastructure.

CUI is corrosion that forms on pipes and equipment beneath insulation, hidden from view. Moisture gets trapped against the metal, and because the damage is concealed, it often goes undetected until it becomes a serious integrity or safety risk. It's one of the most costly and dangerous problems in energy infrastructure, running Norwegian operators over 1 billion NOK a year.

The insulation that protects the pipe also hides the damage. Water finds its way in even through good weather protection, then travels beneath the insulation as temperatures shift, so corrosion can appear far from where the water entered. The pipe systems in an average process plant can stretch 2000km and much of it is insulated. Finding corrosion in that is close to searching blind.

Standard practice is to strip insulation off pipes on a schedule, look for corrosion, repair what's found, then re-insulate. The problem is that more than half of that work turns up no corrosion at all. It's expensive, it puts people at height unnecessarily, and it generates enormous waste, because used insulation is rarely reusable or burnable.

Our robots reach the pipes without scaffolding and without taking assets out of service, so inspection is faster, safer, and cheaper. Just as importantly, it lets operators target maintenance where corrosion actually is, instead of stripping insulation everywhere on a fixed schedule. Better data means the whole maintenance budget can go to the areas that need it.

It's significant. Removing and replacing insulation across a single large plant over a ten-year cycle produces staggering volumes of waste, enough to bury a stadium under a mountain of it, and the CO2 from manufacturing that replacement insulation for just one plant equals the yearly emissions of around 2,000 petrol cars. Norway has dozens of these plants and Europe has hundreds. Targeted, data-driven inspection can roughly halve both the waste and the emissions, because you only disturb the insulation that actually needs attention.

Yes. Cutting unnecessary maintenance lowers cost, improves safety, and reduces both waste and CO2 at the same time. Smarter inspection isn't a trade-off between economics and sustainability. It delivers both.