Navy bets on robots to cut maintenance
The U.S. Navy is investing in robots and AI to automate ship maintenance inspections and triage — a program designed to push fleet readiness toward an 80% goal by taking routine tasks off human crews reported. It’s a government case study in redistributing operational workload with automation rather than shrinking headcount.
Gecko announced) a five‑year IDIQ with a $71 million ceiling and an initial award worth up to $54 million, issued jointly by the U.S. Navy and the General Services Administration. The contract starts) with immediate work on 18 Pacific Fleet ships—destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships—scheduled over the next nine months. Gecko’s wall‑climbing robots, drones and sensors feed into its Cantilever AI to build per‑ship digital twins, which the company says) can detect repairs up to 50 times faster than traditional manual inspections. Because the award runs through the GSA, the vehicle permits) other Department of Defense services to procure Gecko’s robotics and AI under the same contract. The deal directly supports the CNO’s 2024 Navigation Plan (Project 33) target of 80% combat surge readiness by 2027, which names) scaling robotic and autonomous systems as a core focus area. Gecko has) worked with the Navy for several years on surface ships and carriers, growing from port‑engineer evaluations into programmatic deployments that create living, updateable ship records. Company executives estimate) the maintenance backlog costs at roughly $13–$20 billion a year and say pre‑dock inspections let the Navy stage the right parts and personnel in advance to shorten outage times.
