• Boston Dynamics' Spot robot is helping hospitals fight COVID-19 (coronavirus) by reducing the amount of direct contact healthcare workers must have with patients.
• The company is open-sourcing all of its work so other mobile robotics makers can leverage the platform to help more frontline workers.
• Next up: Boston Dynamics is also devising ways to use Spot to disinfect hospitals. In some places, robots are already using UV-C lights to do so.

In the U.S., at least 5,400 nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers treating COVID-19 (coronavirus) patients have contracted the disease themselves. Of those medical professionals, dozens have died—and that's a conservative estimate. Treating patients with a virus that can live on surfaces for days and propagate through the air in respiratory droplets is dangerous, life-threatening work no matter how you slice it.

That's why some Boston-area hospitals have turned to an unlikely assistant: a robotic dog named Spot.

"Starting in early March, [we] started receiving inquiries from hospitals asking if our robots could help minimize their staff’s exposure to COVID-19," Boston Dynamics, the maker of the robot, said in a blog post Thursday. "One of the hospitals that we spoke to shared that, within a week, a sixth of their staff had contracted COVID-19 and that they were looking into using robots to take more of their staff out of range of the novel virus."

Spot has seen internet stardom on YouTube for hijinks like loading a dishwasher, dancing, and hanging out with Adam Savage, but Boston Dynamics recently made the robot available for commercial lease. Since then, the robo-dog has helped bomb squads and worked on an oil rig, but this is its most important gig yet.

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