The U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet includes 18 warships that require inspections, but doing so on a single ship from starboard to port and bow to stern can take more than three months. An army of climbing, crawling, flying and swimming robots, however, can do the same job in about two days.
“Speed and money are important, those are the two main efficiencies with our robots,” said Steve Bourner, a spokesman for Gecko Robotics, in an interview with Techstrong. “They can do the job quickly and save money.”
The Pittsburgh-based company was recently awarded a five-year contract worth up to $71 million to assess the health of ships that comprise the Navy’s Pacific Fleet. The inspections are expected to be completed by the end of 2026. The robots, embedded with AI, can detect even microscopic signs of material fatigue, recommend repair strategies and predict when a compromised area could become serious enough to sideline a ship.
The U.S. Navy is increasingly turning to AI and robotics to keep its fleet battle-ready, outsourcing one of the most labor-intensive aspects of naval maintenance to machines that can inspect vessels inch by inch. In a geopolitical era increasingly defined by tensions, readiness has become more than a bureaucratic benchmark.
For decades, ship inspections relied heavily on what workers in the industry sometimes jokingly called “Joe on a rope,” inspectors suspended by harnesses, tapping steel with hammers and listening for acoustic irregularities that might indicate corrosion or structural weakness. The process was slow, dangerous and imperfect. Human eyes can miss hairline fractures. Human exhaustion can overlook deterioration buried beneath layers of paint.
Gecko Robotics deploys an ecosystem of machines: magnetic crawlers that cling to ship hulls, drones that sweep over flight decks and bridges, and underwater submersibles that inspect submerged portions of vessels. The crawlers use rare-earth magnet wheels, among the strongest permanent magnets available, to grip vertical steel surfaces as they move methodically across the hull. Beneath the waterline, submersibles gather imagery and structural data from areas that are difficult to access. Above deck, drones can scan the bridge.
The scale of the project is enormous. Gecko’s initial work focuses on 18 ships in the Pacific Fleet, but the broader contract also includes up to $21 million in potential work involving the Coast Guard and Atlantic Fleet.
“The Chief of Naval Operations has set a target of 80% fleet readiness,” Gecko said in a recent statement announcing the contract.
“Readiness isn’t just a metric, it’s all that matters,” said Jake Loosararian, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “Prediction, through our robotics and AI products, ensures our brave men and women are the most advantaged in the world in their fight to defend freedom.”
Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer, said “We’re now seeing solutions that make innovation adoption easier and, in doing so, save time, money and risk.”
Modern warships are extraordinarily complex floating cities packed with radar systems, missile launchers, propulsion systems and aircraft operations equipment. A single overlooked structural issue can cascade into operational delays costing millions of dollars, or worse, leave critical vessels unavailable during a crisis.
Data from previous Navy deployments of Gecko’s technology suggest dramatic efficiencies. The company says one robotic evaluation and digital rendering of a flight deck eliminated more than three months of potential maintenance delays. The robots also uncovered defects that traditional inspection methods had failed to detect.
That predictive capability sets the robots apart. Rather than simply identifying existing problems, the AI can model how corrosion or fatigue is likely to evolve years into the future, allowing maintenance crews to prioritize repairs before failures occur.
Gecko’s robots are already inspecting oil refineries, bridges, dams, manufacturing facilities and missile silos. The same sensors that scan a destroyer’s hull for corrosion can examine aging pipelines or power plant boilers. The company says its AI-driven maintenance systems have extended the useful life of some industrial infrastructure by as much as a decade.
“Our world is old, and it’s crumbling,” Loosararian said in a 2024 interview about the company’s broader mission. “The way that we ensure those things are going to be there for us are archaic.”
That argument has gained renewed resonance in recent years as aging American infrastructure has become harder to ignore. The 2024 collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which killed six construction workers, underscored the stakes of deferred maintenance and insufficient data, as a subsequent investigation pointed out.
High-resolution sensors, infrared imaging and predictive algorithms are increasingly being treated not merely as tools, but as a new layer of institutional awareness.
