Navy robot deal quadruples as US looks to ‘outsmart’ China with AI at sea
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...
By Fox News · Fox News
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 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. "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. 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. INSIDE TRUMP’S DEAL TO GIVE AMERICAN TAXPAYERS A MASSIVE STAKE IN NEW $6.6B SUBMARINE DEAL 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. 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. "It's essentially a CAT scan," Loosararian said. "You're basically understanding exactly what's going on." 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. "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. In another example cited by Loosararian, an assessment that initially called for roughly 1,200 square feet…