Could This Robot Dog Be Used for Future Mars Missions?

You’ve seen it dance, now watch it train for space travel.

Transcript

00:00This is Spot the robot dog from Boston Dynamics and while you've likely seen

00:09him dancing with his robot buddies the small yellow automaton has finally been

00:13given a mission worth his engineering. Spot is likely going to Mars and he's

00:17now been given artificial intelligence and is currently training for that

00:20mission in Earth's caves. These are the caverns of the Lava Beds National

00:24Memorial Park in Northern California. Spot is autonomously exploring using AI

00:28that was developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and in association with

00:32its human counterparts it can thoroughly explore these underground cave systems

00:36at record speeds. Searching hundreds of meters of cave system and 3d mapping the

00:40structure in only about an hour. To maintain communication Spot drops nodes

00:44as it goes deeper and deeper into the cave. But once even those are out of

00:47range the AI takes over completely and the robot continues to execute its

00:51mission without further prompting. And according to NASA multiple spots can

00:55communicate and work together as a team examining information from the world

00:58and completing their tasks together and possibly someday doing it on Mars.