For years, people have joked that Boston Dynamics is more a maker of viral videos than of robots. The company has dazzled (and sometimes creeped out) the internet with clips of its robotic dog Spot walking, climbing stairs, jumping, dancing, and gyrating— but not doing any real work.

In September, though, the company (which was previously part of Google) started leasing Spots to companies that want to put it to work, at least in pilot projects. (It reportedly plans to build 1,000 Spots for customers by mid-2020.) The first to debut a full application using Spot is a German-American firm called HoloBuilder. It’s equipped the robot to regularly walk large construction sites, collecting 360-degree images, a la Google Street View, so engineers can track the progress of work.

Spot got its first assignment, fittingly, in the Silicon Valley area—surveying construction of the new Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). HoloBuilder and construction firm Hensel Phelps ran multi-week pilot tests in the spring and fall in which Spot briefly took over the painstaking site surveying job that human field engineers normally do with handheld 360-degree cameras and HoloBuilder’s Reality Capture Platform software. “[It’s] about freeing their time up to do something that is less repetitive,” says HoloBuilder’s CMO Christian Claus.

The company announced the SFO project and plans for future tests of the system, called SpotWalk, today at the Autodesk University conference in Las Vegas. While HoloBuilder is the furthest along, it isn’t the only company that aims to employ Spot in the building industry, and Boston Dynamics sees construction surveying as one of the key markets for Spot.

Robo-dog training

Boston Dynamics’s viral videos lost some of their shine when it turned out that Spot was not navigating around spaces based on its own intelligence but rather was being carefully remote-controlled from offscreen. Once Spot has been steered through a route, however, it can use its sensors and autonomous technology to retrace its steps, avoiding obstacles that may pop up along the way.

So with SpotWalk, engineers first drive the dog by remote control through an entire construction site, using HoloBuilder’s smartphone app. That allows Spot to build a digital map that it uses to roam on its own in the future. “Like a normal dog, you’d go and train it one time to say, that’s the thing you should do,” says HoloBuilder founder and CEO Mostafa Akbari-Hochberg.

HoloBuilder syncs Spot’s map with its own digital maps used to track construction site progress. That allows engineers to specify a list of locations where the robot will stop and snap new images once or twice each day. (Humans only have time to do it about once a week.) “You can see what happened in one location from one moment to the next so you can then manage [the work],” says Claus. “You can travel back and forth in time to see what the progress is.”