{"id":80223,"date":"2026-10-20T04:54:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T09:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/20\/navy-robot-deal-quadruples-as-us-looks-to-outsmart-china-with-ai-at-sea\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T04:54:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T09:54:55","slug":"navy-robot-deal-quadruples-as-us-looks-to-outsmart-china-with-ai-at-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/20\/navy-robot-deal-quadruples-as-us-looks-to-outsmart-china-with-ai-at-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"Navy robot deal quadruples as US looks to \u2018outsmart\u2019 China with AI at sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

FIRST ON FOX:<\/strong> The U.S. Navy<\/a> is quadrupling the ceiling on a contract for AI-powered robots used to inspect warships to $300 million.<\/p>\n

Just six months after initially tapping the technology to help get ships through maintenance and back to sea faster, the expanded agreement with Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics underscores the importance the U.S. military is putting on tech-based solutions. The initial ceiling for the deal was $71 million, but the Navy is pushing to improve fleet readiness amid a widening shipbuilding gap with China.<\/p>\n

“While the U.S. may not be able to out-manufacture faster than China, we can outsmart the ways that we maintain, operate and are ready with our vessels,” Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian told Fox News Digital.<\/p>\n

Gecko says its technology can save the Navy up to $8 million in repair costs on a single ship and identify some structural issues up to 50 times faster than traditional inspection methods.<\/p>\n

INSIDE TRUMP\u2019S DEAL TO GIVE AMERICAN TAXPAYERS A MASSIVE STAKE IN NEW $6.6B SUBMARINE DEAL<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The company is also unveiling a new robot developed specifically for the Navy that can inspect the steel beneath thick coatings on warship decks without first stripping them away.<\/p>\n

Dubbed Komodo, the robot scans a ship’s deck to map corrosion and material thickness, giving maintenance crews a picture of what needs to be repaired before more invasive work begins.<\/p>\n

“It’s essentially a CAT scan,” Loosararian said. “You’re basically understanding exactly what’s going on.”<\/p>\n

Traditionally, determining the condition of steel beneath a ship’s non-skid deck coating can require removing material before crews know the extent of the problem. Komodo is designed to gather that information without first taking the surface apart.<\/p>\n

“The robots are able to actually understand what’s wrong without having to take apart the ship to figure out what to fix,” Loosararian said.<\/p>\n

In another example cited by Loosararian, an assessment that initially called for roughly 1,200 square feet of repair work was narrowed to about 300 square feet after robotic inspections provided a more precise picture of the damage.<\/p>\n

“You reduce and focus the kinds of repairs that you need,” Loosararian said. “You’re repairing less.”<\/p>\n

CHINA\u2019S LONG-TERM FINANCES ARE ALL WET AS BILL TO MAINTAIN HUGE NAVY COMES DUE IN 2031<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The increased ceiling comes just six months after the Navy awarded Gecko a five-year, $71 million contract vehicle to expand the use of its robotic inspection technology across the fleet.<\/p>\n

Under the initial agreement announced in March, Gecko was set to begin work on 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet, including destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships.<\/p>\n

The company’s wall-climbing robots crawl across hulls, flight decks, ballast tanks and other difficult-to-access areas, scanning for corrosion, metal loss and other structural problems. The data is fed into Gecko’s AI-powered Cantilever platform to help maintenance planners determine where repairs are needed.<\/p>\n

The goal is to find those problems earlier, before a ship enters a major maintenance period and crews discover additional work that can extend its stay in the shipyard.<\/p>\n

“The biggest savings are just in speed,” Loosararian said. “Speed \u2014 you can’t put a price tag on it, especially if you’re in the U.S. Navy right now.”<\/p>\n

The expansion comes as Navy leaders seek to push fleet readiness toward 80% while maintenance delays continue to sideline ships that would otherwise be available for deployment.<\/p>\n

China already fields a larger battle force than the U.S. Navy and can produce vessels at a pace American shipyards<\/a> cannot easily match. That has put additional pressure on the Pentagon to keep more of the ships already in the American fleet available for operations.<\/p>\n

For Gecko, the longer-term goal is to move beyond finding existing damage and use years of inspection data to anticipate problems before they force ships into longer repair periods.<\/p>\n

“You are able to predict exactly what’s going to break before it does,” Loosararian said, allowing maintenance planners to have workers, materials and repair plans ready when a ship reaches the pier or enters a shipyard.<\/p>\n

The technology could also reduce the amount of dangerous and labor-intensive inspection work performed by shipyard workers<\/a> as the industrial base struggles with shortages of skilled labor.<\/p>\n

Loosararian said the combination of robotics and AI is ultimately aimed at allowing a limited workforce to spend more time fixing ships and less time determining what needs to be fixed.<\/p>\n

For a Navy racing to keep pace with a rapidly expanding Chinese fleet, he argued, getting more out of the ships already in the water could prove just as important as building new ones.<\/p>\n

“While the U.S. may not be able to outmanufacture faster than China,” Loosararian said, “we can outsmart the ways that we maintain, operate and are ready with our vessels.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FIRST ON FOX: The U.S. Navy is quadrupling the ceiling on a contract for AI-powered robots used to inspect warships to $300 million. Just six months after initially tapping the technology to help get ships through maintenance and back to sea faster, the expanded agreement with Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics underscores the importance the U.S. military … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}