US quadruples Navy robot deal ceiling to $300 million to 'outsmart' China at sea

The US Navy has quadrupled the ceiling on a contract for AI-powered robots used to inspect warships, raising it to $300 million. The expansion is aimed at getting ships through maintenance and back to sea faster.

The expanded agreement is with Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, just six months after the technology was first tapped. The initial ceiling for the deal was $71 million, but the Navy is pushing to improve fleet readiness amid a widening shipbuilding gap with China.

Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian said: 'While the US may not be able to out-manufacture faster than China, we can outsmart the ways that we maintain, operate and are ready with our vessels.'

Gecko says its technology can save the Navy up to $8 million in repair costs on a single ship and identify some structural issues up to 50 times faster than traditional inspection methods.

The company is also unveiling a new robot developed specifically for the Navy, dubbed Komodo. The robot can inspect the steel beneath thick coatings on warship decks without first stripping them away.

Komodo scans a ship's deck to map corrosion and material thickness, giving maintenance crews a picture of what needs to be repaired before more invasive work begins.

'It's essentially a CAT scan,' Loosararian said. 'You're basically understanding exactly what's going on.' Traditionally, determining the condition of steel beneath a ship's non-skid deck coating could require removing material before crews knew the extent of the problem.

He added that the robots are able to understand what is wrong without having to take apart the ship to figure out what to fix. In one example, an assessment that initially called for roughly 1,200 square feet of repair work was narrowed to about 300 square feet after robotic inspections provided a more precise picture.

The increased ceiling comes just six months after the Navy awarded Gecko a five-year, $71 million contract vehicle. Under the initial agreement announced in March, Gecko was set to begin work on 18 ships in the US Pacific Fleet, including destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships.

The company's wall-climbing robots crawl across hulls, flight decks, ballast tanks and other difficult-to-access areas, scanning for corrosion, metal loss and other structural problems. The data is fed into Gecko's AI-powered Cantilever platform to help maintenance planners determine where repairs are needed.

The goal is to find those problems earlier, before a ship enters a major maintenance period and crews discover additional work that can extend its stay in the shipyard. 'The biggest savings are just in speed,' Loosararian said. 'Speed — you can't put a price tag on it, especially if you're in the US Navy right now.'

The expansion comes as Navy leaders seek to push fleet readiness toward 80 percent while maintenance delays continue to sideline ships that would otherwise be available for deployment. China already fields a larger battle force than the US Navy and can produce vessels at a pace American shipyards cannot easily match.

For Gecko, the longer-term goal is to move beyond finding existing damage and use years of inspection data to anticipate problems before they force ships into longer repair periods. 'You are able to predict exactly what's going to break before it does,' Loosararian said, allowing planners to have workers, materials and repair plans ready when a ship reaches the pier or enters a shipyard.

The technology could also reduce the amount of dangerous and labour-intensive inspection work performed by shipyard workers as the industrial base struggles with shortages of skilled labour. Loosararian said the combination of robotics and AI is ultimately aimed at allowing a limited workforce to spend more time fixing ships and less time determining what needs to be fixed.