What does the name Pluto conjure? Fearsome god of the underworld or happy cartoon dog? For engineers at GE Vernova Advanced Research, it seems to be a little of both: They’ve bestowed the famous name on a self-crawling, money-saving, epoxy-spraying robot that is designed to descend into and enter aging pipelines and cheerfully repair them from the inside. Just a bit bigger than a Yorkshire terrier, PLUTO is soon expected to start scratching away at one of the world’s most intractable emissions challenges: methane leakage.

Like most teenagers, Veronica Barner used to act out. Growing up in Bolivia in the late 1990s with two chemical engineers for parents, she would tell her friends that she was going to be a doctor, not an engineer. “That was my rebellious phase,” says Barner, who eventually realized her true calling and is now the head of research and development for Renewable Energy at GE Vernova.