 Hi, I'm Russell and this is Spot. So you've probably seen this robot before, maybe hauling a truck or dancing to Bruno Mars' Uptown Funk. It's the first of this generation of semi-autonomous, four-legged robots, and it does a lot more than just make videos for the internet. For about a month now, Boston Dynamics has been putting Spot to work, leasing units out to industry partners, and seeing how this kind of robot holds up in the real world. When you're standing next to Spot, the striking thing is how small and sturdy it is. It's just under three feet high and weighs 70 pounds, which means it's light enough for a single person to pick up. A lot of the movements you're seeing here are remote controlled by an operator, but Spot has a handful of basic skills it can do automatically. It knows how to climb stairs, how to avoid walls, and even knows how to dance a little. Spot's not tired at all. Of course, we've seen walking robots before, but few of them had Spot's sense of balance. Accelerometers tell Spot if it's moving, and torque sensors in the joints tell it exactly how its weight is distributed. If Spot feels itself tipping forward, a protocol kicks in, telling it to find shorter footing. It also has cameras on all four sides, so it can see where to plant its foot. Spot still can't tell the difference between firm ground and loose dirt, which means navigating these dirt piles got a little chaotic. When it does fall, there's a protocol for righting itself, which works most of the time, although it did need human assistance when we flipped it into the bottom of a particularly steep ditch. The simplest way to use Spot is this controller, which uses the same layout as an Xbox. The left joystick moves Spot forward and back, or strafes left and right, while the right joystick spins it around. You can also use the camera view to see what Spot is seeing, and send it to specific waypoints. Tap a spot on the screen, and Spot will find a way to get there. The controls are really easy to learn, mostly because there isn't that much to control, so much of it's automatic. Within a couple of minutes, I was able to send Spot wherever I wanted, although it does stop at walls because of the object sensor. At the same time, I didn't get the tight connection that you do with video games or RC cars. You can tell it's more designed for automation than human pilots. Boston Dynamics is hoping that a lot of the time, Spot won't need a driver at all. For more complicated tasks, you can chain waypoints together, sending Spot to retrace a path it walked through earlier with human assistance. That could mean checking all the gauges on an oil rig, or taking LiDAR scans of a room from a dozen specific points. This version of Spot mostly knows how to navigate spaces, but the plan is for it to carry more sophisticated tools on its back, like a zoomable camera or the claw it uses to open doors. Industry partners can also build their own modules for more specialized jobs. Attach a methane detector module, and Spot could check a whole facility for gas leaks. Attach a LiDAR rig, and Spot could make a 3D map of a whole building from the inside. It's a completely new way for computer programs to interact with the physical world. Automating tasks that would otherwise be impossible to do without a human being. There's also just straight up entertainment. It's really fun to watch this kind of robot do these precise movements, particularly if you have 10 or 15 of them in unison. It's not hard to imagine 50 Spots dancing Pikachu style in a theme park. Right now, Boston Dynamics has about 60 beta units. That's the yellow guy you're seeing here, but they've already started building the next generation, which is what they're loaning out. Currently they're hoping to have a thousand of them, but right now there's only about 20 being leased out. Now Boston Dynamics wouldn't say exactly what those bots are doing, since most of the partnerships are still confidential. They also didn't tell us exactly how much the robots cost, since technically Spot isn't for sale. All they told us is that the leases were in the range of what you pay to lease a car, which doesn't say much. One thing we have to talk about, and there's really no other word for it, is the creepiness. Some people get really freaked out by Spot. It moves with a precision that we don't see in the natural world, and it stops dead still whenever it doesn't have a task, which can be unsettling. When you watch these videos, there are all sorts of comments about how these robots are going to rise up and destroy humanity. There was even a Black Mirror episode about it. But I didn't get that sense in person. Really Spot doesn't recognize people at all. For the robot, you're just an obstacle that's too big to step on. At the same time, Boston Dynamics is really concerned about any situation where Spot might end up harming a person, even if it's just getting your hand pinched by one of the joints. They also said that they didn't want to sell to any clients who would use Spot to harm people or build weapons modules or anything like that, which was good to hear. Spot's great at climbing through piles of dirt, but it doesn't have the social skills to navigate big crowds, and Boston Dynamics has a lot of work to do before it can build those skills. But that does mean that for now, you're probably not going to see Spot anywhere with lots of people around. The company's thinking about construction sites, oil rigs, maybe a few movie sets, but those are all pretty tightly controlled spaces. For now, Spot's really just a platform, a stable base where partners can build new modules and new software skills. Once people start building on that platform, Spot's going to get smarter fast, and we may start seeing robots in places we never expected.