Robot dogs in the UK: what businesses use them for, which platforms exist, and the rules that apply

A robot dog is a four-legged mobile robot, a quadruped, that carries sensors on a route. Legs are the reason to choose one: they handle stairs, kerbs, gravel, thresholds and cluttered plant floors where a wheeled robot stops. The robot is driven remotely, or follows a mapped route on its own, and brings back what its cameras, thermal imagers, LiDAR or gas sensors recorded.

That makes the robot the carrier rather than the product. What a business really gets is a repeatable round: the same route, at the same points, with the same sensors, as often as needed, without sending a person into a space they would rather not walk. Whether that is worth having depends on the task, the site and what happens to the findings afterwards.

Five uses account for almost all of the business interest in the UK. Each has its own guide on this site.

The fifth is research, education and software development, where universities and engineering teams use the consumer and education class to develop against a legged robot without an industrial budget.

The robot dogs seen in UK work come from a small number of makers: Unitree (Go2 and B2), DEEP Robotics (X30 and the wheel-legged Lynx), Boston Dynamics (Spot), ANYbotics (ANYmal) and Ghost Robotics (Vision 60). They look alike. They are not the same class of machine, and the manufacturers say so themselves.

Most disappointed deployments trace back to choosing the first class and expecting the second. Our founder set out how to tell them apart from the specification sheet in an article for RoboticsTomorrow; the short version, with what changes on a British site, is our guide to reading a quadruped spec sheet. The full side-by-side, with the manufacturers’ own videos, is in security robot dogs compared.

Some can, and the specification sheet tells you which. Two lines decide it. The first is the ingress rating: IP67 means dust tight and able to survive temporary immersion; IP54 means protection from splashing water, a genuine outdoor rating but not a heavy-rain one; no published rating means the manufacturer is making no claim, and you should not make one on its behalf.

The second is the lower temperature limit, which in Britain often rules a machine out before the rain does. The industrial platforms in this class publish ranges of roughly minus 20 to 55 degrees Celsius. The Go2 publishes 5 to 35 degrees, qualified as good weather, which excludes much of a British winter on the manufacturer’s own words.

One trap is worth knowing: IP67 and IP66 are different tests, not a better and a worse version of one. IP67 is about immersion; IP66 is about powerful water jets. Our explainer on IP66 versus IP67 for outdoor robots covers which one a given site needs.

There is no robot-dog licence, and no UK operator registration of the kind drone pilots need. A robot dog is covered by the law that already applies to machines and cameras at work, and site owners and sectors can add their own approvals on top; rail and hazardous areas are examples.

None of this stops a deployment. All of it belongs in the specification and the pilot plan from day one.

The walking is the solved part. What decides whether a robot dog earns its place is whether it fits the task and the way your team already works: the right class for the ground and the weather, sensors chosen for what you actually need to see, and findings that arrive in the control room, maintenance system or incident log your people already use, rather than in another app someone has to remember to open.

That last step is the one most often left until too late. It is what we are developing Forge Anvil for: getting what a robot finds into the systems a site already runs, whichever manufacturer the robot comes from. Which systems that means is scoped site by site in an integration review.

The reliable way to find out whether a robot dog works on your site is a bounded pilot: one route, run repeatedly, with the measures agreed before the robot arrives and an exit condition written in. That is how we structure a pilot programme, and our guide to trialling a quadruped sets out the routes to getting one on site.