Navy Raises Gecko Robotics Ship Inspection Deal to $300M

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — The U.S. Navy is betting bigger on climbing robots and artificial intelligence to keep its warships out of the repair yard, more than quadrupling the cap on a maintenance inspection deal with Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics to $300 million.

The expansion, announced Tuesday, comes only six months after the Navy and the General Services Administration set up the original five-year agreement in March with a ceiling of $71 million. That first phase covered 18 ships in the Pacific Fleet, among them destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships.

Gecko’s machines crawl over hulls, flight decks, ballast tanks and other tight spaces, gathering millions of measurements on corrosion, metal loss and other wear. Company software sorts that data so Navy engineers can decide which areas actually need work before a ship begins a maintenance period, rather than discovering extra problems once it is already in the yard.

Alongside the larger contract, the company introduced Komodo, a deck-driving robot built for the Navy. It reads the condition of steel hidden under the thick nonskid coating that sailors walk on and aircraft land on, using electromagnetic acoustic sensors to measure thickness. Until now, crews often had to strip that coating away before they could judge the damage beneath it.

Gecko says the approach can save as much as $8 million in repairs on a single ship and spot some structural problems up to 50 times faster than older methods. In one case the company cites, a planned repair of about 1,200 square feet shrank to roughly 300 square feet once the robots mapped the damage more precisely.

The push reflects pressure on the service to raise fleet readiness toward 80% while shipyard delays keep vessels tied up. China already has a larger battle force and can turn out new ships faster than American yards, which makes keeping existing ships available a priority for Pentagon planners.

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