Gecko Robotics, Anduril team up for new Baltimore County shipyard
WASHINGTON — Gecko Robotics will deploy its robotics and AI software at Anduril facilities, the company announced today, as Anduril prepares to launch its new Arsenal-2 shipyard in Baltimore County, Md., to manufacture submarine parts.
Gecko Robotics will utilize its inspection technology and its AI-powered software to conduct non-destructive testing (NDT) on these submarine components and will establish a “digital thread” of data to assist with maintenance planning, per Gecko’s announcement.
“It allows us to go in and assess and create that digital baseline of the actual, as-built condition of this critical component, and so it takes things like our robotic capability and actually gathers and sort of inspects what’s going on subsurface within the weld, etc.,” Troy Demmer, co-founder and president of Gecko Robotics, told Breaking Defense.
On Tuesday, Anduril and the White House announced that the company is establishing a new facility to manufacture parts like torpedo turbines for Virginia-class submarines as part of a $6.6 billion investment, with $3.7 billion from private capital and up to $2.9 billion from the Navy. Permitting for the new shipyard is expected to commence immediately, and construction will launch after it has received appropriate approval, Breaking Defense previously reported.
Currently, Anduril is preparing for the facility to launch initial operations in 2030, and plans to expand production from basic submarine parts into more complex sections of the vessel, like the bow.
Anduril also announced Tuesday that it will start to manufacture submarine parts at a new, 160,000-square-foot facility in Orange County, Calif., in conjunction with building the new Arsenal-2 facility. Gecko’s technology will be used at the Orange County facility as well, according to the firm.
“We are already embedding Gecko’s NDT technology into real production workflows at our Orange County protofactory and integrating it deeply with ArsenalOS,” Bill Noderer, Anduril’s vice president and general manager for shipbuilding, said in a statement today. “This will reduce inspection wait times, give our inspectors better tools to do their jobs, and establish quality processes that we can bring to the Arsenal-2 shipyard in Maryland from day one.”
Anduril’s shipyard announcement comes as industry has struggled to meet the Navy’s production goal of two Virginia-class submarine deliveries annually. The Navy’s shipbuilding plan released in May said investing in the submarine industrial base is critical to hitting that production target.
Gecko Robotics has previously worked with the US Navy, and in March, the service awarded the company a contract of up to $71 million over five years to use Gecko’s hull-scaling robots and artificial intelligence to identify possible repairs on ships, including destroyers in the US Pacific Fleet.