







In a series of drills this week, the Marine Corps tested whether a new four-legged companion had what it takes to work with infantrymen in a variety of situations. The subject of the tests was Boston Dynamics' Spot robot, a 160-pound, hydraulicly actuated quadruped robot first revealed by the Google (soon to be Alphabet) subsidiary in February.

Spot was brought to the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, home of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, by a team from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA has tested a number of previous robots from Boston Dynamics, including the BigDog quadruped robot, with the Marine Corps. Ben Swilling, a roboticist with DARPA who accompanied Spot for the tests, said "I think a robot like Spot has tons of opportunities we could use it for, like scouting or load carriage."

The Corps has also tested autonomous vehicles, such as the GUSS from TORC Robotics, and other robotic systems for support of infantry in the field. But Spot is both lighter and quieter than most of the other systems that have been tested, and can handle terrain that autonomous vehicles or even the pack mule-like BigDog can't.

Controlled wirelessly by a game controller tethered to a laptop computer, a Spot robot was put through a number of different terrain conditions and situations, maneuvering through hills, woods, and urban environments. The operator can be as far away as 500 meters, and doesn't need to be within line of sight. In an urban combat drill, Spot was sent ahead into a building as a scout ahead of a Marine squad to look for potential threats—a role the Army and Marine Corps might have used working dogs for in the past.

"Spot is great and has exceeded the metrics that we’ve provided," Captain James Pineiro, head of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab's Quantico branch, told a Defense Media Activity reporter covering the tests. "The Marines [working with Spot] have been very receptive to the new technology, embrace it and came up with new ideas we couldn’t even dream up. We see it as a great potential for the future dismounted infantry. We want to continue to experiment with quadruped technology and find ways that this can be employed to enhance the Marine Corps warfighting capabilties."