The U.S. Navy has awarded its largest robotics contract to date to Gecko Robotics, betting that wall-climbing machines and advanced sensors can help keep warships in the fight and out of dry dock.

Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics secured a five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity agreement with the Navy and the U.S. General Services Administration. The contract opens with a $54 million task order and allows for up to $71 million in work, focused on automating the inspection and maintenance planning of the fleet.

The Navy will initially deploy Gecko’s systems across 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The robots are designed to crawl over hulls and deep into confined spaces, capturing high-resolution data on steel thickness, corrosion, weld integrity and other structural indicators that are difficult and dangerous for human inspectors to reach.

That data feeds into software that builds a detailed digital twin of each vessel. By turning ships into living models that are constantly updated with real-world measurements, the Navy aims to spot problems earlier, prioritize repairs and compress maintenance timelines that currently sideline a large portion of the fleet.

Fleet readiness is the driving concern. Roughly 40 percent of Navy ships are unavailable at any given time because of lengthy maintenance cycles, a drag on operations that also carries a price tag estimated in the tens of billions of dollars annually. Leadership has set an ambitious target of 80 percent readiness within the next few years, a goal that will require both new processes and new technology.

Gecko’s approach promises to shift maintenance from reactive to predictive. Instead of discovering hidden damage only after a ship enters a yard, commanders and engineers could see emerging issues while a vessel is still deployed, plan parts and labor in advance and perform targeted fixes between major overhauls.

The contract caps a multiyear relationship between Gecko and the Navy that began when a port engineer in Japan sought help building a preventative maintenance program. Successful trials on individual ships have now scaled into a fleet-level effort, positioning robotics and digital twins as core tools in how the Navy manages the aging steel at the heart of its global power projection.