Anyone who’s priced bodywork on an older car has heard this one from the guy at the shop: he can’t give you a number until he grinds the paint off and sees how much metal is actually gone. The bubble on your rocker panel might be a dime’s worth of rust or it might be the whole panel. You pay to find out.<\/p>\n
The Navy has the same problem, on a slightly bigger scale.<\/p>\n
Warship decks are covered in a thick, gritty coating called non-skid, and the only reliable way to know what the steel underneath looks like has been to rip the coating off and look. So a Pittsburgh company built a robot that rolls across the deck and reads the steel through the coating instead, and the Navy’s response, six months into a contract with that company, was to quadruple the ceiling on it.<\/p>\n
If you’ve ever stood on a flight deck, or seen one on TV, non-skid is the rough, dark surface that stops sailors, forklifts and helicopters from sliding off into the ocean when the ship rolls. It’s basically paint with grit mixed in, applied thick, and it wears out. Aircraft land on it, tie-down chains drag across it, and salt water sits on it, so the Navy replaces it on a schedule.<\/p>\n
The catch is what happens to the steel under all that. Non-skid is great at hiding corrosion, and once a ship is in a maintenance period, the way to find out how bad things are has been to strip a section, measure the metal, and strip some more. You don’t know the size of the job until you’re already doing the job, which is a frankly terrible way to plan anything.<\/p>\n
And the decks aren’t small. The Navy’s fact file lists a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship at 844 feet long with a 106-foot beam, so you’re talking about a steel surface roughly a football field and a half in size, coated edge to edge, sitting on a 40,500-ton hull.<\/p>\n
The robot is called Komodo, and the company is Gecko Robotics. According to Gecko’s October 20 announcement<\/a>, Komodo scans through thick non-skid without stripping or damaging it and produces a full-deck heatmap of corrosion and steel thickness, so repair crews can plan the work before the ship ever enters dry dock. Jake Loosararian, Gecko’s co-founder and CEO, put it more simply when he spoke to Fox News Digital<\/a>: “It’s essentially a CAT scan.”<\/p>\n How does it actually do that? Gecko’s president and other co-founder, Troy Demmer, explained the physics to Seapower back in May<\/a>, and the short version is pretty clever.<\/p>\n A normal ultrasonic thickness gauge has to touch bare metal with a bit of gel in between, which is useless on a deck buried under a layer of grit. Komodo instead uses an electromagnet to make the steel itself vibrate, sending an ultrasonic pulse down through the plate from the inside.<\/p>\n The pulse bounces off the far side, the robot times the echo, and that timing tells you how thick the metal is at that spot. Where the steel has rusted thin, the echo comes back sooner.<\/p>\n Demmer described the robot as rolling along like a paint roller, with the sensor scanning in passes and every reading landing on a map on a laptop. He also said it works at sea, in different sea states, so a crew can survey the deck six to 12 months before the ship is due in the yard.<\/p>\n That’s what I like most about it, frankly. The ship doesn’t have to be tied up for the scan to happen.<\/p>\n Does it change the size of the job? Loosararian gave Fox one example. An assessment that initially called for about 1,200 square feet of deck repair got narrowed to roughly 300 square feet once the robot had mapped where the damage actually was.<\/p>\n That’s going from a decent-size apartment down to a one-car garage, on a ship where every square foot of stripped deck is a day somebody isn’t flying off it. He didn’t name the ship, and I couldn’t find anyone who has.<\/p>\n What Gecko hasn’t published is how big Komodo is, what it weighs, or how fast it covers a deck. The company’s wall-climbing TOKA robots, the ones that crawl hulls on magnetic wheels, move at up to 60 feet per minute according to Gecko’s own videos, but Komodo is a different machine built for flat decks, and Demmer told Janes only that it’s ground-based and carries more sensors than the earlier robots.<\/p>\n The October announcement came with photos of it parked on a flight deck and a heatmap of the results, and no spec sheet. If Gecko puts one out, I’ll update this.<\/p>\n Now for the money, which is what most of the headlines have been about, and which takes a little translating.<\/p>\n In March, the Navy and the General Services Administration gave Gecko a five-year contract with a $71 million ceiling. It’s an IDIQ, which stands for indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, and in plain terms it’s a menu.<\/p>\n The ceiling is the most the government can order off that menu over five years, and the initial order, for 18 ships in the Pacific Fleet, was worth up to $54 million. On October 20, the same two agencies raised the ceiling to $300 million.<\/p>\n Gecko calls that a fourfold expansion, which is right on the ceiling and tells you nothing about what’s been spent, because an IDIQ never obligates anyone to spend the full amount. The Navy hasn’t published a figure for what it has ordered so far, and I wouldn’t expect it to.<\/p>\n The 18 ships are destroyers, amphibious warships and littoral combat ships, and Breaking Defense reported in March that the work was scheduled over nine months. Loosararian told the newsletter Tectonic that same week that Gecko was already on two of them. So by the time the ceiling went up, the company had had roughly seven months on Pacific Fleet decks and hulls, and the Navy apparently liked what came back.<\/p>\n Komodo is the deck machine. For hulls and ballast tanks, Gecko uses the TOKA crawlers, which stick to the steel with magnetic wheels and take ultrasonic thickness readings as they climb.<\/p>\n Everything the robots collect goes into Cantilever, Gecko’s software, which builds a model of the ship’s condition and flags where the metal is thin. That’s the “AI” in all the press releases, and from the looks of things it’s doing the fairly unglamorous job of turning a few million thickness readings into a to-do list.<\/p>\n Then there are the big claims. Gecko says its technology can save the Navy up to $8 million in repair costs per ship and find some structural problems up to 50 times faster than manual inspection, turning months into days.<\/p>\n Both of those are the company’s numbers. The Navy hasn’t put out its own, and the closest thing to an official data point is a line in Gecko’s March release saying a single robotic evaluation of one flight deck eliminated more than three months of potential maintenance delay.<\/p>\n “Potential” is doing some work in that sentence. I’d treat the $8 million as a ceiling of its own until a Navy audit says otherwise, and I’d still say the 1,200-to-300 example is the more convincing argument, because it’s a measurement and not a projection.<\/p>\n The short answer is that the Navy is doing both, and the building half can’t carry the load on its own.<\/p>\n Back in 2024, the Navy’s top officer at the time, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, set a goal of having 80% of the fleet combat-surge ready by 2027, meaning ships that can deploy on short notice rather than ones sitting in a shipyard or early in a training cycle. Her successor, Adm. Daryl Caudle, kept the number.<\/p>\n He also told reporters at the Surface Navy Association symposium on January 14 that no part of the force is there yet, including the submarines, and that everything except the amphibious ships is above 60%. The vice chief of naval operations, Adm. James Kilby, calls 80% a stretch goal, which seems fair.<\/p>\n Every day a destroyer spends in a yard waiting on a repair nobody planned for is a day it counts against that number. We’ve written before about how much effort the Navy puts into a maintenance job as small as swapping two fenders<\/a>, and that was on a museum ship. On a deployable one, a surprise under the deck coating can turn a scheduled availability into an open-ended one.<\/p>\n Then there’s the comparison everyone in Washington makes. The Pentagon’s own report to Congress puts China’s navy at more than 370 battle force ships, with 435 expected by 2030, while the Congressional Research Service<\/a> counted 296 U.S. battle force ships as of September 30, 2024, and the Navy’s own budget projects 294 by 2030.<\/p>\n Loosararian’s pitch to Fox was that if American yards can’t out-build that, the Navy can at least be smarter about keeping the ships it already has out of the shop. That’s a vendor talking, but it’s also arguably the whole logic of the contract.<\/p>\n Is a robot going to close a gap of 75 ships and growing? No. Is it going to get a destroyer out of San Diego a few weeks earlier because the yard knew what it was cutting into before the ship arrived? That seems pretty likely, and the Navy has been handing exactly this kind of patient, repetitive work to machines all year, from a drone ship that spent six months mapping seafloor<\/a> to a crawler reading rust through paint.<\/p>\n Gecko, which had around 275 employees as of May, about half of them in Pittsburgh, announced the $300 million ceiling on October 20, 2026, and the underlying contract runs five years from the March 17 award. Demmer told Seapower he expects the Navy’s Atlantic surface force to come asking for a separate contract of its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anyone who’s priced bodywork on an older car has heard this one from the guy at the shop: he can’t … <\/p>\nWhat the Navy actually signed<\/h2>\n
So why pay to fix ships instead of just building more?<\/h2>\n