Today, Spot is up-and-running at hundreds of locations across the globe—from manufacturing plants and electric utilities to mines and universities. Spot explores, inspects, dances, and delivers. Our customers are proving Spot’s value and pushing the boundaries of what robots can do.

Our team takes a look back on how Boston Dynamics Spot’s capabilities have grown over the past 3 years and the robot’s uses to automate, innovate, and keep people out of harm’s way.

2023 In Review

During this time, Spot—our agile mobile robot—continued to set the standard for industrial inspection. With both hardware and software upgrades in June, Spot gained new capabilities, making acoustic, thermal, and visual inspection automation easier than ever.

Thanks to Spot, our customers automated more than 1 million data captures in 2023 and continued to expand their deployments. National Grid and Purina, for example, put this data to work to inform predictive maintenance and digital transformation, making Spot a key part of their day-to-day operations.

Innovation leaders like Meta AI and OPG investigated mobile manipulation applications. Leveraging the Spot Arm—as well as the robot’s powerful API—our customers have been able to develop innovative applications to interact with the world, keep people safe, and integrate robotics into new environments. In our own R&D efforts, we used these capabilities to explore how embodied AI and foundational models can transform human-robot interaction.

Spot wasn’t the only Boston Dynamics robot to see success in 2023. See what other milestones we reached last year.

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Spot in front of the Boston Dynamics headquarters

2022 in Review

In 2022, Spot was a valuable teammate and a powerful tool for operators to accomplish even more. In fact, with 100 robots operating in 35 countries, customers around the globe put Spot to good use. Spot walked further, captured more data, and opened both literal and metaphorical doors to safer and more efficient operations.

  • Spot walked more than 9,000 miles (14,500 km), the equivalent of walking from our headquarters in Boston to the South Pole.
  • Our customers recorded thousands of missions covering roughly 340 miles (545 km) for Spot to autonomously navigate and collect data. Spot inspected over 130,000 industrial assets in factories, power generation facilities, construction sites, and more.
  • Driving Spot manually, operators used Spot’s arm to pick up 10,000 objects and open over 7,000 doors.

What is the impact of all those miles, missions, and manipulation tasks? Here’s how some of our customers were able to automate difficult tasks and keep their teams out of harm’s way with Spot’s help in 2022.

Infographic slide 1: In 2022, our customers put 1000+ robots to work
Infographic slide 2: With operations in 35 countries, spot walked over 9,000 miles
Infographic slide 3: Spot inspected over 130,000 industrial assets
Infographic slide 4: In 2022, Spot extended your team

Avoid Downtime

GlobalFoundries (GF), a global semiconductor manufacturer, turned to Spot to further automate their data collection for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. In 2022, Spot collected information about the thermal condition and analog gauge readings of pumps, motors, compressed gas systems, and more so the GF team can build models that better predict planned maintenance and downtime.

Improve Efficiency

Researchers at Myers-Lawson School of Construction at Virginia Tech partnered with Procon Consulting to bring Spot to three of the university’s construction projects. The research team explored how robots can improve the efficiency of construction progress monitoring, performing regular data collection so that site supervisors can focus on more strategic jobs.

Keep People Safe

At Dominion Energy, Spot was put to work to reduce health and safety risks for workers. In 2022, Dominion piloted Spot to automate routine inspections and respond to potential safety hazards. They were able to automate data collection for site radiation surveys and reduce exposure for workers.

2021 in Review

A little over a year after Spot graduated from our early adopter program and was released for sale, our first customers had helped us answer the question, “Can robots handle the real world?”

In 2021, we released new enterprise capabilities for Spot and many organizations demonstrated how Spot can be used to keep people safe and to improve productivity and efficiency in their operations. Our customers and partners developed integrations that let Spot go further and do more. Here’s just some of what Spot robot’s uses during its first year in the real world.

Hazardous Inspections

Spot offered visibility in hazardous locations—underground, in electrified sub-stations, in nuclear plants, and more—with the advanced mobility to go where wheeled robots and drones cannot.

UKAEA deployed Spot within the New Safe Confinement area at Chernobyl, with a specially developed radiation detection payload for robotic inspection. Experts hope that the robot will be used during the deconstruction work of Chernobyl’s Sarcophagus to routinely evaluate the evolving radiation and contamination hazards. Spot’s quadrupedal design meant less contact with ground and improved mobility—major advantages over wheeled or tracked robots.

National Grid piloted Spot at a substation outside of Boston. One use case had Spot inspecting a high-voltage facility the size of a soccer field where no people can go during operation. Maintenance shutdowns are extremely costly, so National Grid hopes Spot’s routine inspections can help avoid downtime and better plan maintenance activities.

Construction Site Monitoring

Spot automated accurate, frequent reality capture to provide comprehensive jobsite visibility and allowed customers like Foster + Partners and Brasfield & Gorrie to act on data insights.

Remote Inspection

With both autonomous self-charging and teleoperation capabilities, Spot served as eyes and ears on the ground, conducting routine inspections in remote locations.

Aker BP sent Spot offshore, working with our partner Cognite to monitor operations. The  COVID pandemic created an urgent need to support remote offshore operations via robotics and technology.

bp sent Spot nearly 200 miles offshore to its Mad Dog rig, with the goal of remotely inspecting hard-to-reach areas to avoid the risk and expense of sending humans into these difficult environments. On the rig, Spot will take on the task of routine facility inspections, including reading gauges and listening for noise anomalies in machinery.