Boston Dynamic’s Spot robot will “make work safer”

Boston Dynamics has released its latest update for quadruped robot ‘Spot’. Updates include making it smarter at inspections and collecting data, without the need for human intervention.

The robot, called Spot Release 3.0, has added “flexible autonomy and repeatable data capture, making Spot the data collection solution you need to make inspection rounds safer and more efficient.”

The robot will remove the risk of exposing human operators to environmental hazards and can also reduce the costs of data measurement.

The main feature of Spot is ‘Autowalk’ – As an operator takes the robot through the path using the remote controller interface, the robot will be able to record and memorise the path, enabling it to repeat it independently in the future. Autowalk is valuable for inspection missions in industrial facilities, factories, mines, and construction sites, the company says.

The latest update improves Autowalk and reduces the need for human guidance and intervention. Operators are now able to edit Autowalk missions and add actions such as reading indicators, capturing images, or run third-party code. Spot is also now able to receive better planning capabilities and will be able to find the best path to perform target actions. The pathfinding capacity has also been updated, so the robot can adapt to new changes in its inspection paths such as unexpected obstacles. Further, it can now carry out scheduled inspections without human supervision off-hours.

Boston Dynamics has also improved the robot’s data collection and processing capabilities, such as giving it the ability to capture images from the same angle during Autowalk cycles and have them processed through deep learning models running on the device or in the cloud.

Effectively, Spot has been designed to facilitate the challenges of remote inspection by handling different terrain, slopes, and obstacles. The new update is aimed at making Spot more autonomous and less reliant on human assistance.

Spot has also improved compatibility with cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM. This feature allows Spot to automatically incorporate data collected during Autowalk into a broader data-based workflow of companies.