Boston Dynamic's robot canine Spot has a future as a guard dog that can boost safety and efficiency

Right now, the focus is on Spot, the versatile quadruped first made commercially available in June 2020. 'The next big industry for Spot is really in this market that we're calling industrial sensing or dynamics sensing,' Zack Jackowski, chief engineer of the Spot product, told told CNBC over the weekend. '[That's] where we have robots walking around places like manufacturing plants, chemical plants, utilities [and] installations, and using the robots to collect data on what's happening in these facilities in an automated way,' he said. Being able to get repeatable, high quality data from Spot, Jackowski added, could enable companies to boost safety and efficiency in ways they never considered before. While Boston Dynamics likes to play up Spot's softer side -- releasing videos of it playing fetch and dancing to bops by K-pop sensation BTS and other acts -- it's already employed by Hyundai to patrol assembly lines at a Kia factory in Gwangmyeong, Korea. Hyundai has equipped the robot with a thermal camera and three-dimensional LiDAR sensing technology that allows it to see humans, determine whether doors are open or closed, monitor high-temperature systems, and detect fire hazards.