The United States Navy is looking to robots, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), to conduct inspections of its warships. The sea service and the General Services Administration (GSA) awarded a five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract to Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, in which the company will provide its wall-climbing robots to inspect 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
The contract, the largest by the Pentagon for robots, has an initial value of $54 million with a $71 million ceiling.
The goal of the contract is to improve fleet readiness, with the chief of naval operations (CNO) calling for a target of 80 percent. Gecko Robotics’ AI and robotic technology could help the U.S. Navy reach its goal, with the company claiming it can identify repairs up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual methods involving manned inspections.
The company has said this will reduce maintenance delays and boost battle readiness.
It will be carried out across the Pacific Fleet’s destroyers, amphibious assault ships, and littoral combat ships (LCS).
“Readiness isn’t just a metric, it’s all that matters,” said Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of Gecko. “This growing partnership is about unfair advantages Gecko is deploying to our Navy; and how prediction, through our robotics and AI products, ensure our brave men and women are the most advantaged in the world in their fight to defend freedom.”
The company’s wall-climbing robots and its AI-powered software have been used previously to inspect critical infrastructure at power plants and on oil and gas pipelines.
Robotic Inspections
According to Gecko Robotics, its wall-climbing robots, drones, and fixed sensors will be used to collect unprecedented data on the health of U.S. Navy ships and submarines. The inspections will look at key components, the hulls, decks, and welds, where the AI can create accurate models and identify any current and future structural issues, including ones that the human eye cannot see.
It has continued to conduct inspections on U.S. warships, during which its robots have identified more than 4.2 million data points, while traditional methods found only 100.
The company’s past efforts have reduced the lead time and work hours associated with maintenance cycles for the U.S. Navy’s warships while increasing the availability of data and enabling the detection of defects that cannot be identified through traditional methods. It noted that a single robotic evaluation and digital rendering of a flight deck eliminated more than months of potential maintenance delay days.
“Where value hasn’t improved, that’s where opportunity lives. Cracking the cost equation is just as important as cracking the physics equation,” said Justin Fanelli, chief technology officer for the Department of the Navy.
“We’re now seeing solutions that make innovation adoption easier and in doing so save time, money, and risk,” added Fanelli. “When these American companies, pure play defense and dual use companies like Gecko Robotics, choose to do hard things and move the needle on our outcome metrics, not by percentage points but by orders of magnitude, it results in faster, better portfolio management.”
A Keystone State Company
Gecko Robotics was founded in 2013, and its flagship platform, Cantilever, empowers industries such as manufacturing, energy, and defense to build, operate, and maintain critical infrastructure. The company has been working with the United States Navy for four years.
In December 2022, it was awarded an 18-month, $1.5 million contract through the U.S. Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.
The Pittsburgh-based firm previously worked across the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet, with efforts spanning destroyers, amphibious ships, and aircraft carriers, and both Virginia-class and Columbia-class nuclear submarine programs.
“For more than 200 years, Pennsylvania manufacturing has helped shape America’s national defense. I’ve seen firsthand how Gecko Robotics is advancing that legacy with AI and robotics in Western Pennsylvania,” said Senator Dave McCormick. “The partnership between Gecko Robotics and the U.S. Navy shows how engineers, researchers, and skilled tradesmen from a great Pennsylvania company are leading advances in technology, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and robotics and giving our military the capabilities it needs for the next generation of American defense.”
