US Navy looks to robots, AI to extend vessel health and maintenance

The U.S. military will look to robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve fleet maintenance and readiness, according to Gecko Robotics. 

The company has worked out a deal that will see the U.S. Navy introduce wall-climbing robots and AI to "reduce delays and maintain its fleet" with an eye toward extending the life of ships and submarines. 

"We’re proud to grow our partnership with the Navy around keeping ships in the fight and increasing the pace of production on the Columbia," Jake Loosararian, co-founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics, said, referring to the Columbia-class submarine program in a press release.

"Making sure the brave men and women of the U.S. Navy have the tools they need to perform their vital missions safely and effectively is the perfect example of what our team wakes up every morning focused on." 

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The main benefit Gecko has promised is a reduction in work hours associated with maintenance. The company also believes it can improve data analytics to help find defects in these processes to improve defensive structures of the vessels. 

Gecko said it can capture 4.2 million data points while traditional methods capture "less than 100 data points on key vital defense structures."

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Loosararian started Gecko Robotics in 2013 as an evolution of a project he started during college. He started developing his first robot in 2012 while at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, according to Fortune. 

He built the robot to satisfy a project pitched by an engineering professor to handle structural issues at a nearby power plant. Loosararian’s project ended up donated to the plant, which used it for years. 

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Loosararian redesigned the hardware to build the robots for his eventual company, Gecko, pouring his savings into the company. He cycled through co-founders and worked without pay for years before finally finding his footing with his new projects.

Gecko started partnering with the U.S. Navy in 2023 mainly to help decrease maintenance delays for ships and submarines, but it has seen a 400% increase in use during 2024. In the coming months, it will start to work on aircraft carriers and will start to gather "granular data on the health of the Navy’s vessels." 

"That data is then fed into Gecko’s AI-powered operations platform, Cantilever, to help substantially reduce growth work, maintenance timelines and help the ships get back to sea faster," the company said in its press release. 

"The new deals cement Gecko’s role in building and maintaining critical defense assets that support both national and global security," the release said. "It also makes the U.S. Navy a pioneer in using the very latest technology to reduce delays and unexpected maintenance for its fleet — a challenge faced by countries around the world."