$5M US Navy expansion to speed maintenance cycles

The expansion will increase the speed and quality of maintenance cycles for U.S. Navy surface ships, including amphibious assault ships.

Gecko Robotics, a leader in decoding the built world with robots and software, announced a further expansion of its work with the U.S. Navy under a new $5 million ceiling contract with Huntington Ingalls Industries. The expansion will increase the speed and quality of maintenance cycles for U.S. Navy surface ships, including amphibious assault ships.

“We built Gecko Robotics to collect data that has never been accessible before and use it to solve real world problems,” says Jake Loosararian, CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics. “Helping the Navy increase the speed and efficiency of the maintenance process has a direct impact on U.S. and global security. We’re proud to support this vital mission with mature technology that has been tested and approved by leaders across the Navy.”

Gecko will perform the work across various locations, using robots to inspect ships for damage, gathering data for digital models of vessels and feeding Gecko’s AI-powered software platform. The data is leveraged to increase the speed of repair plans and maintenance cycles. The fully structured data sets will also allow the Navy to move towards a more predictive maintenance planning in the future.

Gecko’s contract with Huntington Ingalls represents an expansion of its work with the Navy that currently includes Destroyers and amphibious assault ships at U.S. Navy regional maintenance centers. Gecko also has a contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop robotic technology to assess the infrastructure of nuclear missile launch facilities.

According to Navy data, Gecko significantly reduces the lead time and work hours associated with maintenance cycles while increasing the availability of data and finding defects missed through traditional methods. For example, for one Navy asset, traditional methods captured 100 data points while Gecko’s platform captured more than 4.2 million.