Robotics and Ship Repairs: A Way Ahead for the U.S. Navy Fleet and their Maintenance

The Navy has tapped Gecko Robotics for a five-year Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to employ the Pennsylvania-based company’s hull-scaling robots and artificial intelligence to detect potential repairs for vessels like destroyers.

Initially, Gecko will begin working on 18 ships in the US Pacific Fleet over the next nine months as part of the contract, with its robots inspecting destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships, the company’s CEO Jake Loosararian told Breaking Defense. The contract has a ceiling of up to $71 million over the five years.

The effort is in lockstep with the Navy’s broader initiative to improve combat surge readiness across the fleet to roughly 80 percent by 2027, according to Gecko. As of April 2025, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jim Kilby said that readiness for surface ships was at approximately 68 percent.

Delays in maintenance and modernization availability are key factors contributing to the service missing that goal, but Gecko says that its technology detects repairs up to 50 times faster than traditional efforts.

“It’s a first example of the Navy trying to build a living, breathing, digital record and an understanding of the health of the most critical assets they have in pursuit, of course, of getting to 80 percent readiness,” Loosararian said. “This is one of the most important ways that they’re trying to approach getting to that goal.”

Gecko’s robotic systems gather a host of information about the condition of the ships’ hulls, decks, and welds without destroying any of the materials that are on some of these vessels, according to Loosararian, and collect significantly more data points more quickly than the traditional model employing shipyard workers to conduct these inspections.

Shipyard workers can then use Gecko’s software to establish models and pinpoint areas that may need repairs, based on the data collected.

“It saves incredible amounts of time, incredible amounts of money. That’s one of the largest ways that the Navy is able to begin to take an analog process and make it digital and predictable,” Loosararian said. “But you need robots to be able to digitize the physical world, and then the software helps to take actions back into the real world.”

The Navy has previously used Gecko robots and systems to complete work on surface ships, including destroyers and amphibious vessels, as well as aircraft carriers, according to the company. However, this is the largest contract the Navy has awarded Gecko thus far.

Published by Breaking Defense on March 17, 2026 under the title: “Navy taps Gecko Robotics for ship-scaling robots to identify repairs in Pacific Fleet.”