Navy Awards up to $71 Million Contract for Robots to Speed Up Ship Repairs

Gecko Robotics says its drones, climbing robots, and sensors will help cut maintenance delays as the Navy pushes toward an 80 percent readiness goal.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Stockdale arrives at San Diego naval base, on Feb. 21, 2025. Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Jordan Steis/U.S. Navy

The U.S. Navy has signed a contract worth up to $71 million to use roaming robots to identify where ships need repairs, a step aimed at addressing maintenance bottlenecks that have been troubling the sea service.

Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh-based startup, announced the deal on March 17. The effort aligns with the Navy’s goal of achieving 80 percent fleet readiness, which means 80 percent of the fleet would be ready to deploy at any given time, leaving only 20 percent in maintenance or early-stage training.

To help speed up a repair process that has in recent years become a major drag on naval readiness, Gecko said it will use drones, wall-climbing robots, and fixed sensors to collect data on ship components, decks, welds, and hulls.

That data, paired with artificial intelligence tools, is used to identify existing and potential structural issues that may not be visible to the naked eye.

“A single robotic evaluation and digital rendering of a flight deck eliminated over 3 months of potential maintenance delay days,” the company said in a release, adding that its systems have helped accelerate maintenance “up to 50 times faster and more accurately than manual methods.”

The contract is structured as a five-year, “indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity” agreement, allowing the Navy to order an unspecified quantity of supplies or services over that period. Gecko will begin work with 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet, according to the announcement.

Although the contract carries a ceiling of $71 million, the initial award is valued at $54 million over five years.

This is not the first time Gecko has worked with the Navy. The company said it has already worked across the Navy’s surface fleet on a range of vessels, including destroyers, amphibious ships, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines.

The 80 percent readiness benchmark was set in the fall of 2024 by then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti. At the time, she said the target was modeled in part on an earlier push to raise the readiness of F/A-18 naval fighter jets from about 50 percent to 80 percent—an effort she said demonstrated that the goal was achievable.

For ships, however, reaching the 80 percent target has been complicated by growing maintenance delays, increasing reliance on cannibalizing ships for spare parts, and a rising number of major equipment breakdowns.

A 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that while the Navy aims to avoid delays in ship maintenance, repair and upkeep delays increased from an average of five days in 2011 to 19 days in 2021. Investigators noted that this deterioration occurred even as steaming hours—the time ships typically spend in operations or training—fell over the same period.

Compounding the problem has been a shortage of spare parts. Citing supply chain shortfalls for certain components, Navy officials told investigators they had increasingly reused or transferred parts from one ship to another to keep vessels operational. Between 2011 and 2021, more ships were also reporting serious parts failures, according to the GAO report.

Weak readiness levels can significantly hinder Marine Corps deployment and training. Although amphibious ships account for only about 10 percent of the U.S. fleet, they are the preferred alternative to aircraft carriers when commanders need a more tailored or rapidly available option. Marine expeditionary units launched from those ships can carry out a broad range of missions, from fighter jet strikes to non-combatant evacuation operations and disaster relief.

In a separate 2024 GAO report on amphibious warfare, federal investigators found that the readiness rate for the Navy’s amphibious fleet was just 46 percent between 2011 and 2020. That, the report said, “cumulatively resulted in 28.5 years of lost training and deployment time for those ships and their associated Marines.”

The 80 percent readiness push has continued under Franchetti’s successor, Adm. Daryl Caudle, who recently said that the Navy is near that goal.

“We have a target of 80 percent on average; I’m probably about 10 percent below my target, about 70 percent there,” Caudle said in February during an interview on the Fed Gov Today show. “So, we got work to do to get on target.”