Dirty job: Cute robot roughneck heads to offshore oil rig

A nimble robotic quadruped made famous in a flurry of viral videos will head offshore to help oil companies keep offshore installations running smoothly. This is the latest deployment for Spot, a robot created by Boston Dynamics that's amassing an impressively diverse resume as its adopted by more commercial enterprises. After an initial early adopter program concluded successfully, Spot officially went on sale to commercial users earlier this year. The oil rig deployment is a good example of the utility of a nimble, task agnostic platform that can be used for inspection in heavy industries and dangerous environments. The deployment is the work of Cognite, a global industrial AI software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, which partnered with Aker BP to deploy Spot on the Skarv installation, 210 kilometers offshore in the North Sea.