While Future Food-Tech London this year was filled with humans from almost every corner of the food industry, one non-human guest was attracting much of the attention.
Spot the robot dog was created by US robotics company Boston Dynamics, which released it commercially in 2020. The dog can be used in food factories for inspections, data collection, and spot checks (pun very much intended).
The robot can collect real-time thermal, acoustic and visual data, detecting issues like product leaks, overheating equipment and ventilation faults.
What can Spot do that a human can’t?
Spot is not only an additional pair of eyes and ears. It is much more than that.
The dog walks through a factory, collects data that is relevant for optimising operations, and feeds it back to a human team, explains Geert Maesmans, vice president of R&D at ingredients company Cargill, which is using the dog in its own factory in Amsterdam.
The robot is able to expand Cargill’s capacity to make necessary checks beyond that of humans.
One unintended side effect of having Spot in the factory, he says, is that the dog makes “a really classical manufacturing environment more attractive for young people to come and join us and work for us”.
Cargill has been using similar technology for a long time, developing automation and coupling different components of its factories with sensors. Yet Spot gives the company more than this.
The dog provides a more visual, tangible representation of how Cargill is using artificial intelligence in its factories.
Spot “makes sure we can run our factories better”, says Maesmans. But it is also “much more tangible than when you put a sensor onto a pipe”.
How common is Spot in food and beverage?
Is Spot being used a lot in food and beverage, then, or is Cargill an outlier?
“Food and beverage is actually one of our largest industries”, says Dan Zuba, key account manager at Spot creator Boston Dynamics.
The company’s robots are used across many different verticals, he explains, and a lot of the problems they address are not sector-specific.
Take food and beverage, for example – as in many other factories, “there’s a lot of processing lines, there’s a lot of packaging lines, there’s a lot of utilities that power these”. And Spot can augment the capabilities of existing staff.
What will robots do in the future?
According to Zuba, this is just the beginning. From a hardware perspective for Spot, he says the company may add new payloads, features and functionalities to robots such as Spot. For example, it recently integrated Gemini AI into the dog.
This is laying the foundation for the next stage: moving from simple data collection to manipulation. It is currently developing a humanoid robot called Atlas, which will be able to perform tasks like moving objects or loading machines.
This robot will not be commercially available for years yet. But would Cargill adopt such a task-doing, human-shaped robot in the future?
The company is certainly interested, says Maesmans. It is currently testing whether the robot can work in its factories, and how it fits into different factory set-ups.
“If at one point in time this becomes a real opportunity and we see value in it, we will try it.”
