Robotic Dogs Are Being Tested For Facility Assessments by Scala Data Centers

Robotic dogs are being tested by Brazilian data center operator Scala for fire safety assessments. While Scala doesn't specify the brand or manufacturer, the robot appears to be a Go1 from the Chinese company Unitree. The Go1 is a little smaller than some other robot dogs, at around 30 cm tall and half a meter long. Together with a 16-core onboard CPU + GPU unit capable of 1.5 teraflops of computing, it provides a variety of onboard camera and sensor choices. Scala posted a picture of "Scaley," which looks to have a LiDAR sensor. Scala, a Brazilian IT company founded in 2020 by DigitalBridge, now has three data centers in Tamboré (with the construction of two more), one in Campinas, and one in the heart of So Paulo. In addition to a two-building facility in Porto Alegre, a second data center campus is being built in Rio. The company intends to grow into Mexico and Colombia in addition to building three data centers in Chile. 

There are several operators looking at using quadruped robots for data center operations, including Scala. This month, Swiss robotics company Anybotics revealed that since the summer of 2022, Digital Realty has been utilizing one of its Animal robots to undertake routine inspection visits at a site in Switzerland. Utah-based Novva has introduced Boston Dynamics Spot robots at its main campus, and the company claimed it will introduce more in the future. The company has also used drones for security and is considering letting microdrones wander data centers for inspection. Mexican operator Kio also previously used two Spot machines for data center operations, and GlobalFoundries installed Spot at a chip manufacturing facility in Vermont for monitoring. 

At its Oracle Labs location in Chicago, Illinois, Oracle is presently testing Spot in a data center. Developers of quadruped robots include Xiaomi and Weilan in China and Ghost Robotics in the US, in addition to Anybotics, Boston Dynamics, & Unitree.