Insider Brief
- The U.S. Navy and GSA awarded Gecko Robotics a five-year IDIQ contract with a $71 million ceiling to deploy AI and robotics for maintenance and health assessment across military assets, starting with 18 ships in the Pacific Fleet.
- Gecko’s robots and AI models collect detailed structural data and identify defects significantly faster than manual methods, aiming to reduce maintenance delays and improve fleet readiness toward the Navy’s 80% target.
- The contract expands Gecko’s role across naval platforms, leveraging wall-climbing robots, drones and sensors to enable predictive maintenance and broader adoption of AI-driven asset management across U.S. defense systems.
PRESS RELEASE — The U.S. Navy and GSA have awarded Gecko Robotics a five-year IDIQ contract with a $71 million ceiling to deploy artificial intelligence and robotics to assess and maintain the health of military assets. Gecko will start work with 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet with the initial award worth up to $54m over a five-year period. Customers in all services will have access to this government-wide vehicle.
The Chief of Naval Operations has set a target of 80% fleet readiness, which Gecko will have a crucial role in helping to meet. Gecko’s advanced AI and robotic technology identify repairs up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual methods, reducing maintenance delays and boosting battle readiness. This work will be carried out across destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships.
“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. Today we announce not a contract, but a new standard that is universal across all industries: if it isn’t ready, it doesn’t count.”
“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. 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.”
“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.”
As countries around the world race to reduce maintenance delays to their naval fleet, the U.S. is leading the way by being one of the first to adopt AI and robotics for health assessments, improving the speed and accuracy of repairs, in addition to reducing unexpected reactive maintenance.
Gecko’s wall-climbing robots, drones, and fixed-sensors collect an unprecedented amount of data on the health of U.S. Navy ships and submarines, including components, hulls, decks and welds, with AI being used to create accurate models and identify any current and future structural issues, even ones that cannot be seen by the human eye.
In previous years, Gecko has worked across the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet, with efforts spanning destroyers, amphibious ships and aircraft carriers, and both Virginia and Columbia-class nuclear submarine programs.
Data from the U.S. Navy has shown that Gecko significantly reduces the lead time and work hours associated with maintenance cycles while increasing the availability of data and finding defects that cannot be done through traditional methods. A single robotic evaluation and digital rendering of a flight deck eliminated over 3 months of potential maintenance delay days.
Image credit: Gecko Robotics
