This Wall-Crawling Robot Scans Navy Ships to Build Digital Twins

The Navy is using Pittsburgh, Penn.-based Gecko Robotics to scan an amphibious assault ship and an Arleigh Burke Class destroyer

Gecko Robotics’ TOKA Series robots in action scanning the deck of a U.S. Navy Destroyer. (Image Source: Gecko Robotics, Inc.)

Gecko Robotics’ TOKA Series robots in action scanning the deck of a U.S. Navy Destroyer. (Image Source: Gecko Robotics, Inc.)

The United States Navy has begun using wall climbing robots matched with AI-powered software for advanced robotic assessments of ships to produce rapid, accurate insights for condition based and predictive maintenance.

The Navy’s benchmark maintenance cycle is every 36 months. Instead, Navy Admiral Daryl Caudle, Commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, says the navy is averaging 45 months.  

He said in a speech at the Surface Navy Association’s 35th Annual National Symposium in Washington, D.C., that shipyard capabilities are a critical area that needs to be on-time. “This is placing a large and unsustainable strain on our Optimized Fleet Response Plan, our operational availability, and our forward presence options,” he says.

“We must get after this to ensure Fleet Commanders are able to sustainably and predictably flow forces to combatant commanders. Our ships must get in and out of maintenance on time—this is an all hands effort—we must find efficiencies to restore the readiness and availability of our fleet to both train and deploy.”

After a trial period, the Navy is using Pittsburgh, Penn.-based Gecko Robotics’ to scan an amphibious assault ship and an Arleigh Burke Class destroyer using Gecko’s Rapid Ultrasonic Gridding (RUG).

The data gathered from the scans is then fed into Gecko’s software platform to generate a digital twin of each ship. Once created, these digital twins will increase maintenance efficiency and reduce the amount of time each maintenance cycle takes.

The project involving Gecko and the Navy was done in partnership with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS), the U.S. Naval Ship Repair Facility and Japan Regional Maintenance Center (SRF-JRMC).

According to Navy data, Gecko is significantly reducing the lead time and work hours associated with maintenance cycles while increasing the availability of data and finding defects missed through traditional inspection methods.

The Navy’s traditional methods captured 100 data points while Gecko’s platform captured more than 4.2 million. Gecko’s products also reduced the lead time required for ship rudder inspection from 11 days to one. It has also reduced the number of man hours needed for rudder inspection by 15 times.

Gecko says using this technology across all regional U.S. Navy maintenance centers would return 575 equivalent days annually to the Navy and yield 200 hours to reallocate skilled workforce to critical activities.