Spot
Made by Boston Dynamics
Photo: Boston Dynamics
- dof
- 12
- ip rating
- IP54
- length mm
- 1100
- weight kg
- 32.5
- payload kg
- 14
- max slope deg
- 30
- max speed mps
- 1.6
- height mm standing
- 840
- battery runtime min
- 90
Who's exposed
Jobs in the threat radius
- industrial facility inspector (manufacturing plant walk-downs)
- offshore oil & gas platform inspection technician
- utility substation inspection technician
- security / perimeter patrol guard
Deployment status
Commercially shipping since 2020, with by far the largest deployed base of any legged inspection robot — third-party estimates put 1,500 to 3,000+ units in customer hands globally, against a Chinese-made rival like DEEP Robotics' X30/Lynx M20 line (already in this catalog) at a fraction of that scale. Named industrial customers include Michelin (tire-plant inspection), National Grid (substation walk-downs), Lockheed Martin (manufacturing-facility rounds), and — the two hardest-to-automate sites in this catalog — bp's Mad Dog Gulf of Mexico platform and Aker BP's Skarv field in the Norwegian Sea, both using Spot for offshore gas-leak and gauge inspection in place of a human walking the same round with a handheld sensor. Spot Cam 2, released January 2026, added a 4K/25x-zoom PTZ camera with radiometric thermal imaging, extending the inspection payload further into utility and security use cases.
When this hits the labor market
1-3 years for the narrowest, most dangerous, and most repetitive inspection rounds — offshore platforms, live substations, refinery units — where the case for removing a person from the walk is already made on safety grounds alone, and where bp and Aker BP have already run it past the pilot stage. 3-5 years for routine indoor facility-inspection rounds (manufacturing, warehousing) where the economics depend on integration cost falling further. Full perimeter-security patrol replacement is further out and depends on autonomy improvements this entry will track, not just hardware already in the field.
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The inspection robot every other inspection robot gets compared to
This catalog already has a legged inspection robot — DEEP Robotics’ X30 and Lynx M20, real shipping products with real customers. What it was missing was the one that actually set the category: Spot has been commercially available since 2020, and by scale of deployment it isn’t close. Third-party estimates put 1,500 to 3,000-plus units in the field worldwide, at named customers most competitors can only cite as prospects.
Michelin uses Spot for tire-plant inspection rounds. National Grid runs it through live substations. Lockheed Martin walks it through manufacturing floors. And in the two environments where sending a person is genuinely dangerous — bp’s Mad Dog platform in the Gulf of Mexico and Aker BP’s Skarv field in the Norwegian Sea — Spot does the gas-leak and gauge-reading rounds that used to require a technician physically present on an offshore rig.
What it actually does
Spot stands 840mm tall, weighs 32.5kg, and covers ground at up to 1.6 m/s on 12 degrees of freedom across four legs, climbing a 30-degree slope and carrying up to 14kg of payload. A single charge lasts about 90 minutes — enough for one inspection round, then swap the battery and go again. It’s rated IP54, so weather and dust on an offshore platform or in a refinery aren’t disqualifying. January 2026’s Spot Cam 2 upgrade added a 4K, 25x-optical-zoom PTZ camera with radiometric thermal imaging — the sensor package that turns a mobility platform into an actual inspection instrument, reading a gauge or a heat signature a human would otherwise have to walk up and look at directly.
There’s no public list price, which is itself a signal: Boston Dynamics sells enterprise deployments through direct sales quotes, not a shopping cart. Public procurement records — Honolulu PD near $150,000, NYPD roughly $750,000 for two — suggest six figures is the realistic range once software, the manipulator arm, and integration are added to the base unit.
Why we care for LostJobs
Inspection work is one of the clearest cases in this whole catalog for a simple reason: the job itself is often unpleasant or hazardous, which means the economic case for automating it doesn’t have to fight worker preference the way warehouse picking or driving might. Nobody is nostalgic for walking a gas platform’s gauge rounds in the North Sea weather. That’s exactly why bp and Aker BP moved past pilot stage — the substitution isn’t “robot versus job someone wants,” it’s “robot versus a job that was already being minimized for safety reasons.”
The job categories under most direct pressure are narrow but real: the technician who used to walk the same inspection round every shift, the substation crew member doing routine live-equipment checks, the security guard on a fixed overnight patrol loop. None of those disappear immediately — someone still has to interpret what Spot reports back, dispatch it, and handle the exceptions it flags. But the routine, repetitive, physically taxing version of “walk the same path and read the same gauges” is the first slice of inspection work with a shipping, six-figure, named-customer robot already doing it today.