Boston Dynamics Spot

Spot is a four-legged robot designed to walk, climb, and crawl through environments that would stop a wheeled machine. Weighing 32.5 kg and standing about 84 cm tall, it carries up to 14 kg of payload — typically cameras, LiDAR scanners, thermal sensors, or gas detectors — and runs for roughly 90 minutes on a hot-swappable battery. Boston Dynamics sells the base Explorer kit for $74,500, with enterprise configurations running from $175,000 to over $300,000 depending on the sensor package and software licences.

The robot's main commercial role is autonomous inspection. Oil refineries, construction sites, power plants, mines, and more recently data centres use Spot to walk pre-programmed routes, collect sensor data, and flag anomalies without sending a human into dangerous or hard-to-reach areas. Boston Dynamics' Orbit software manages fleets of Spots remotely, scheduling missions and aggregating the data they bring back. As of early 2026, the company says over 1,500 units are operating across more than 40 countries.

Spot evolved from Boston Dynamics' earlier quadruped research — BigDog, LittleDog, and the original SpotMini — but dropped hydraulics entirely in favour of an all-electric design. That made it quieter and far more practical for indoor work. A 7-degree-of-freedom arm attachment (sold separately at around $65,000) lets it open doors, turn valves, and pick up objects. In early 2026, Boston Dynamics announced an integration with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 model, adding AI-driven reasoning for inspection tasks.

Spot is not cheap, and its 90-minute battery life limits continuous operation. But for the specific problem of getting eyes and sensors into places humans would rather not go, it has more real-world deployments than any other legged robot on the market.