FDNY deploys new search-and-rescue tool: Spot, a robot dog

Spot, a black-and-white dog topped with what looks like a firefighter’s helmet, hobbled through the wreckage of a partially collapsed parking garage in lower Manhattan.

Who had survived? Who had perished? How bad was the damage?

From the sidewalk, one of his FDNY masters controlled Spot — actually a robotic dog — a safe distance from the structurally unsound building, receiving reports Spot transmitted from inside.

One man died and five others were injured when a century-old building at 57 Ann St. housing the garage caved in just after 4 p.m. Tuesday. Vehicles parked on the roof pancaked atop one another in the collapse.

So during the search-and-rescue, Spot was unleashed, so to speak. Drones were also flown around the scene.

Spot is at the vanguard of technology expected to revolutionize search-and-rescue operations most everywhere, eventually.

The robot dog can go where humans and real canines would otherwise be imperiled. Victims can be found quicker. Precarious conditions can be identified more readily and solutions identified.

When it works, of course.

A video of Spot that went viral shows “him” beginning to climb through the rubble and then toppling over on his side.

Through spokesman Jim Long, the FDNY declined to comment about the use of robotic dogs.

Next generation of robot dogs

There are also privacy concerns among civil libertarians about the dogs being used for other, more nefarious purposes, particularly by the police to conduct broad surveillance and other tasks, akin to the dystopian Netflix anthology “Black Mirror.”

Mayor Eric Adams thinks dogs like Spot are an unalloyed good, and that their operation Tuesday proves it.

Standing near the wreckage at Tuesday’s collapse, Adams proclaimed vindication from critics who days earlier had assailed the NYPD’s acquisition of the technology.

“I do want to point out that thank God we had the robotic dog that was able to go in the building,” the mayor said. “This is ideally what we talk about, not sending a human being inside a building as unstable.”

Spot represents the next generation of robot dogs, succeeding the bomb-detecting kind that have been around since after 9/11 — robots that move by tracked wheels like a tank and wield a manipulator arm to pick through suspicious objects — as depicted in the Oscar-winning film “The Hurt Locker.”

“Spot, and the legged robots, those are a big breakthrough in locomotion, and so they’re still pretty experimental,” said Robin Murphy, who is one of those forecasting that the robot technology will eventually spread for search and rescue.

But it’s still very early on, and there’s no established playbook for using the legged robots for such operations, said Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University.

Murphy, also director of the nonprofit Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and a former technical searcher herself, has deployed robots at more than 30 emergencies, including at an earthquake, two mine disasters and three building collapses.

Only within the last three years has the technology advanced enough for robot dogs like Spot to be deployed from the lab into the field, Murphy said.

By transmitting data back to human experts at the scenes of precarious situations, Spot can help answer critical questions: Who is trapped? How unstable is the structure, and how best to shore it up?

The robots can go where a human can’t (because of too-tight spaces) or shouldn’t (because of structural instability).

“A lot of people will be looking at those streams, kind of doing a Vulcan mind-meld with the robot,” she said.

The robot can “see” inside where ground-penetrating radar might not be ideal due to interference from metal and debris. And it can carry small items, such as a radio or food to a trapped person.

Two weeks ago, in announcing the acquisition of two of the robot dogs, at a cost of $74,000 a piece, the FDNY said in a statement: “This system is capable of the mitigation of a chemical dispersal device, radiological debris and will deploy relatively quickly ahead of Haz-Mat responders in these situations to gather useful data for response.”

In Suffolk, 'we're sticking to our real dogs'

Most fire departments across the country don’t have Spot-style robot dogs.

While Nassau County has a hazardous-materials robot capable of monitoring and conducting air sampling, the county neither has a Spot nor plans to buy one, said Nassau’s chief fire marshal, Michael Uttaro.

Joe Agovino, special assistant to the commissioner of Suffolk’s Fire Rescue & Emergency Services, said the agency has access to a hazardous-materials robot owned by the Brookhaven fire marshal, but the county has no plans to buy a Spot either.

“In the meantime, we’re sticking to our real dogs,” he said.

Not everyone is a dog person — at least when it comes to police maintaining the latest robot kind as pets.

Two years ago, a robot dog being tested by the NYPD was put out to pasture under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio after video posted to Twitter showed the dog operating at a Manhattan housing project, exiting a building and edging down some stairs.

“I’ve never seen nothing like this before in my life,” one woman is heard saying as Spot ambled around. Earlier in the year, the dog was at the scene of a home invasion in the Bronx.

All of that caused an allergic reaction among civil libertarians, coming in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd unrest.

A report March 30 by the NYPD’s own inspector general found that the department had violated, if not all but ignored, a 2020 law requiring the general disclosure of surveillance technology.

The NYPD has spent nearly $3 billion on secret surveillance technology over a 12-year stretch, advocacy groups said late last year.

Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of one of those groups, the Manhattan-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, is alarmed by the NYPD’s, and Adams’, latest plans.

He noted, for example, that the NYPD has been under a legal consent decree for decades for questionable surveillance tactics dating back to the Vietnam War era against political organizations.

“Every time we see new, cheaper technology, we see police departments abusing it to surveil more and more of our lives,” he said. “And this is especially concerning for a police department like the NYPD, which has systematically used surveillance capabilities to target political dissent, communities of color and most of all those speaking out against NYPD violence.”

Still, the robots can have law enforcement uses beyond surveillance.

In 2016, the Dallas police department used an explosives-packed robot to blow up a gunman who had killed five police officers and had resumed firing. (Asked by Newsday the next day whether the NYPD would consider using a robot to kill someone under similar circumstances, then Commissioner Bill Bratton suggested yes: “You know, God bless them.”)

In 2021, following the uproar over the robot dog being used in the city, the NYPD canceled its $94,000 contract with manufacturer Boston Dynamics (whose website promises the “agile” dog can “capture limitless data.”)

But earlier this month, de Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, reversed course, announcing that the dog “is out of the pound” and en route back to the NYPD, along with a Knightscope K5, a camera-, sensor- and speaker-equipped human-size outdoor robot capable of patrol and surveillance.

"I believe that technology is here,” Adams said. “We cannot be afraid of it.”

By Matthew Chayes

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Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.