The last time a robotic dog set foot in New York, as a police helper, it was run out of town by politicians and citizens who feared the implications.
Now “Spot”, which was developed by Boston Dynamics, has returned as a firefighter. The fire department has bought two of the robots, at $75,000 each, saying they will be used in rare emergencies. This could include entering the unstable wreckage of a collapsed building to search for survivors.
“It’s very early in our stage of setting them up and equipping them,” a spokesman for the fire department said yesterday. “The training has not officially started yet. This is a new programme.”
The NYPD acquired one of the robots in 2020 and deployed it at the scene of a stand-off and at a hostage situation, where it was sent with food strapped to its back for the captives, operated by a controller who could send it along streets, into buildings and up flights of stairs.
However, when the robot appeared last February, pacing down a snowbound street in the Bronx, the local Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that “robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of colour with under-resourced schools”. She added that her followers should ask themselves when they last saw world-class technology sent into such districts in the service of education, healthcare or housing. The police retired it from the force two months later.
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Captain Michael Leo, of the fire department’s robotic unit, hoped that the robots’ service in the fire department would help assuage fears engendered by Hollywood depictions of terminators. “Our whole mission is a lifesaving one,” he told The New York Times. “That’s the core thing. These robots will save lives.”
