Autonomous patrols are reshaping enterprise security, reports Boston Dynamics.
As late as the 1990s, New York City’s landmark Macy’s department store relied on a pack of Doberman Pinschers – known as the “Canine Crime Corp” – to patrol its iconic 11-story Manhattan building after hours.
The dogs roamed floorboards alongside guards or conducted solitary sweeps, providing physical detection early mechanical alarms couldn’t match.
As leadership noted at the time, no sensor on the market could replicate a trained dog’s acute sense of smell and mobility.
In the modern era, the idea of trained security dogs running loose inside commercial facilities feels like a relic of the past.
These days, enterprise security systems offer an array of high-tech tools to protect assets and property, including cameras with AI-based analytics, biometric access control systems, motion sensors and video management platforms.
Yet stationary security systems still suffer from physical limitations.
Fixed cameras only capture what falls directly within their field of view, leaving blind spots.
Expanding physical surveillance across facilities or outdoor perimeters requires infrastructure investment – including additional cameras, cabling, specialised lighting and ongoing maintenance.
In industrial, commercial or agricultural environments, achieving complete stationary coverage is financially and logistically impractical.
Same tricks, new dog
While the Canine Crime Corp may have seen its heyday decades ago, modern security “dogs” are making a powerful comeback – only with a robotic twist.
Today, agile quadruped platforms like Boston Dynamics’ Spot® offer security operations a reliable, highly consistent way to conduct routine patrols in remote, hard-to-reach, or hazardous areas, much like their canine predecessors.
First commercially available in 2020, Spot was engineered as an industrial robot specialising in mechanical and environmental inspections.
As a quadruped, Spot navigates physical challenges that challenge traditional wheeled devices: climbing stairs, manoeuvring around changing environments, and traversing unstructured terrain.
Equipped with sensor payloads, Spot conducts scheduled autonomous missions, checking for visual, thermal and acoustic anomalies around the clock.
Addressing security staffing shortages
The industry’s adoption of mobile robotics is driven in large part by staffing shortages.
In-house safety departments and security providers struggle with high employee turnover and recruitment hurdles, particularly for night shifts and isolated posts. To improve retention and operational resilience, organisations leverage automation to handle “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks.
Deploying quadruped robots for routine patrols allows human officers to step away from monotonous perimeter walks. Instead, personnel can be centralised into SOCs to monitor automated feeds, evaluate high-level data and handle active incident response.
Securing the world’s largest sporting event
As the FIFA World Cup 2026™ took place across 16 host cities in the US, Canada and Mexico, Boston Dynamics Spot® robots took on one of their most visible assignments yet: helping protect the largest sporting event in the world.
FIFA Security looked to new technology to support efforts for the 2026 World Cup, and Spot’s latest features were a great fit.
Complementing existing infrastructure, robots were deployed at the International Broadcast Center in Dallas, as well as NY/NJ Stadium – conducting perimeter patrols to support asset protection and risk detection.
“FIFA Security personnel have been utilising Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots to ensure security and asset protection at select venues to help keep players, staff, media and fans safe while attending the FIFA World Cup™,” said G.B. Jones, Chief Safety and Security Officer, FIFA World Cup 2026™.
“The robots have proved to be a valuable resource in our perimeter security efforts and their regular patrols are augmenting our security protections.
“Supporting FIFA’s broader commitment to innovation that benefits the football world, we are pleased to deploy cutting-edge technology like Spot to help keep people out of harm’s way.”
For a tournament spanning three countries, dozens of venues and millions of attendees, that combination of tireless, repeatable patrols and human decision-making is exactly the model Spot was built for, scaled now to the world’s biggest stage.
Remote agricultural monitoring
In Hawaii, global life sciences leader Bayer partnered with Boston Dynamics’ partner Asylon Robotics to incorporate Spot – branded as “Drone Dog” – into its farming operations across 8,000 acres spanning Oahu, Maui and Molokai.
These fields produce crucial corn seed supplies but face ongoing physical threats from vandalism, wildfires and destructive wild boars.
Bayer had relied on officers in patrol vehicles, but hiring night-shift personnel proved difficult. Today, Spot carries out automated patrols across predetermined field checkpoints.
Equipped with optical and thermal cameras, Spot inspects gates, verifies perimeter fencing and streams live video directly to a remote SOC before returning to an automated weather-proof dock to recharge.
Spot also reduced Bayer’s reliance on gas-powered patrol vehicles, driving down costs. Furthermore, because Spot follows identical routes on every patrol, teams gain a visual baseline across the property.
Data key to efficient operations
These deployments demonstrate the effectiveness of using Spot to bolster patrols – but the benefits extend well beyond perimeter security. Thousands of Spot robots are already deployed as a key part of a holistic facility management, encompassing security, safety, maintenance, reliability and more.
Industry 4.0 runs on data. For many industries, this means gathering information about their operations consistently and at a scale to create auditable records, develop digital twins and predict issues before they escalate. Historically, data has come from a combination of IoT cameras or sensors and employees conducting manual checks.
IoT sensors generate continuous data, but can be expensive to install en masse. As a result, many companies only place sensors in the most critical areas and rely on manual inspections for the rest.
Though these inspections provide flexibility, they can be time-consuming, physically challenging and inconsistent when done by different personnel across shifts.
Spot offers the best of both. More than an agile robot, it is a sensing platform that can collect data for multiple stakeholders. Instead of viewing activities like safety, operations, maintenance and security as separate workflows, Spot can support all four, and more.
Depending on the sensor payload, Spot can collect visual, thermal, acoustic and environmental data from the same inspection points, helping organisations create a repeatable record of facility conditions and giving teams a clearer view of asset health, operational performance, security concerns and workplace safety.
“If you send a human out, they can look at two or three things at a time,” said Yasser Bangash, Senior Facilities Engineer at oil and gas giant, bp. “A robot like Spot can have several different sensors or cameras on it, and process all that information at the same time.”
Simple. Flexible. Scalable.
For manufacturers looking for an extra set of eyes, retailers looking to support loss prevention and security providers looking to offer customers more coverage, Spot delivers a flexible tool to extend operations.
Spot and Boston Dynamics offer the tools to fit Spot into existing operations, processes, and infrastructure, rather than reinventing workflows and retrofitting facilities around robotics.
Spot is a user-friendly machine designed for people without a background in robotics. Users can program the robot to operate autonomously, navigating it through a facility and assigning actions for the robot to complete on its inspection round. Spot will then execute that mission on an established schedule.
Teams can manually operate Spot from the Boston Dynamics Orbit™ platform, to monitor sites remotely, conduct ad hoc inspections and respond to alerts to gain real-time situational awareness from anywhere in the world.
For facilities with more in-depth managed security needs, Asylon Robotics offers Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) infrastructure.
This solution bypasses the complexity of managing an in-house robotics program by combining autonomous hardware (DroneDog, DroneSentry) with 24/7 remote monitoring via its Robotic Security Operations Center (RSOC).
Enterprise orchestration
Generating high volumes of patrol data is only useful if that information is organised, searchable and accessible across the enterprise. Boston Dynamics’ Orbit™ software platform functions as the central intelligence engine for managing robot fleets, site mapping and data distribution.
Orbit moves Spot beyond a simple remote-controlled camera, turning it into an enterprise orchestration solution:
Site View & Historical Spatial Audits
During a single patrol, Spot can capture hundreds of optical photos, thermal scans and gauge readings.
Orbit organises this spatial data into Site View, a 360-degree digital walkthrough of the facility that updates over time. When facility managers or security officers investigate a recurring issue, they can compare historical Site View records from exact coordinates across days, weeks or months.
This allows teams to determine precisely when a physical anomaly first appeared. If an issue appears repeatedly across multiple patrols, managers can address the root process rather than treating it as a one-off event.
AI Visual Inspection (AIVI) & Gemini Integration
Rather than requiring operators to program rigid inspection algorithms, Orbit enables natural language querying through AI Visual Inspection (AIVI). Integrating Google DeepMind’s Gemini vision-language models into AIVI provides contextual reasoning.
Operators can set up automated alerts using conversational prompts, instructing the software to scan for abnormalities during Spot’s rounds.
The system can interpret complex visual environments that rule-based software struggles with, such as reading analog pressure gauges, inspecting handwritten safety tags, identifying chemical spills or verifying mounted safety gear.
Centralised SOC Integration & Downstream Automation
For enterprises managing multi-site operations, Orbit aggregates data from deployed robots into a single operational dashboard. Security personnel can monitor live patrols, review automated alerts, adjust mission schedules or remotely pilot a robot during an active alert.
Robust APIs also feed structured inspection data directly into existing enterprise workflows, building management tools and automated ticketing software.
Comprehensive autonomous coverage
Enterprise security operations are moving away from manual paper logs, inconsistent shift handoffs and passive cameras. Spot and Orbit represent a unified model that combines physical mobility with structured, automated data collection. What began as a novel solution for chronic security staffing shortages has matured into a platform for holistic facility management. By taking over the repetitive work of physical patrols, these robots provide teams with what was once impossible: a continuous and auditable visual history of their physical environments over time.