Under the amused gaze of many tourists, a robot dog wanders the ancient stone alleys of Pompeii's famous archaeological park. Meet Spot, a friendly, yellow-and-black remote-controlled creature with a gangly gait who looks like a dog crossed with an insect -- all wrapped up in a robot's body. Spot's current mission at Pompeii is to inspect hard-to-access areas of the sprawling ruins, to collect data and alert his handlers to safety and structural problems. "Particularly underground structures where safety conditions won't allow (staff) to enter, such as in the park's many very narrow and dangerous tunnels," Pompeii's general director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, told AFP. His purvey includes surveying tunnels dug out in clandestine excavations, which Zuchtriegel said "unfortunately still take place in the area".

The nearby volcano blackened the sky and swallowed the city in clouds of ash; centuries later, robot dogs now prowl the ruins, guarding the city's dead against the ravages of time. Boston Dynamics' robot dog, Spot, will help archaeologists and preservation crews by patrolling the 66-hectare site for signs of erosion, damage, and looting. The volcanic ash that buried Pompeii in 79 CE turned a thriving Roman coastal city into a well-preserved tomb--and a time capsule. Today, the archaeological site is one of the most famous in the world, and it continues to reveal new glimpses of life in a cosmopolitan Roman city during the empire's heyday, like an ancient fast-food counter excavated in 2020. But in 2013, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) found that erosion and weathering were taking a toll on the parts of the site archaeologists had excavated so far. To protect the ruined city and keep restoration workers safe, park authorities needed to find new ways to monitor for damage, restore ancient structures, and preserve them for the future.

A four-legged robot called Spot has been deployed to wander around the ruins of ancient Pompeii, identifying structural and safety issues while delving underground to inspect tunnels dug by relic thieves. The dog-like robot is the latest in a series of technologies used as part of a broader project to better manage the archaeological park since 2013, when Unesco threatened to add Pompeii to a list of world heritage sites in peril unless Italian authorities improved its preservation. Spot, made by the US-based Boston Dynamics, is capable of inspecting even the smallest of spaces while "gathering and recording data useful for the study and planning of interventions", park authorities said. The aim, they added, is to "improve both the quality of monitoring of the existing areas, and to further our knowledge of the state of progress of the works in areas undergoing recovery or restoration, and thereby to manage the safety of the site, as well as that of workers." Until Spot came along, no technology of its kind had been developed for archaeological sites, according to Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii archaeological park. Park authorities have also experimented with a flying laser scanner capable of conducting 3D scans across the 66-hectare (163-acre) site.

In a few horrible hours, Pompeii was turned from a vibrant city into an ash-embalmed wasteland, smothered by a furious volcanic eruption in A.D. 79. Then in this century, the excavated Roman city appeared alarmingly close to a second death, assailed by decades of neglect, mismanagement and scant systematic maintenance of the heavily visited ruins. The 2010 collapse of a hall where gladiators trained nearly cost Pompeii its coveted UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. But these days, Pompeii is experiencing the makings of a rebirth. Excavations undertaken as part of engineering stabilization strategies to prevent new collapses are yielding a raft of revelations about the everyday lives of Pompeii's residents, as the lens of social class analysis is increasingly applied to new discoveries.