Spot Longterm Autowalk

This research project with Ontario Power Generation involves adapting Boston Dynamics Spot’s localization system to longterm changes in the environment. This is done by re-recording Spot’s waypoint point clouds on subsequent Autowalks and then intelligently merging the point clouds to create a new map that looks more like the current environment than the original Autowalk map.  To test the algorithm we did 218 Autowalks outside around the Ontario Tech University campus over 16 months covering over 180 km of walking. Our algorithm worked very well adapting to different seasons and conditions as the environment changed. During this testing, we mounted a GoPro camera on the back of Spot and took a video of each walk for a year from Spot’s point of view. We put the footage together as a moving time-lapse video where the day changes as Spot completes the Autowalk around the campus.