Boston Dynamics Robot Dog TikTok Hits 4.5M Views

Princeton University students are creating TikTok videos of Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot to demonstrate its potential civilian use cases and the results are going viral.

The videos are being added under the TikTok account, SPOTlight, which shows Spot interacting in some musical videos.

In one, which has racked up 4.5 million views, student Gigi Schadrack programmed Spot to line dance alongside her, jumping and moving in sync.

In another, with 1.4 million views, Schadrack ballet dances with the robot.

Schadrack said the videos are intended to demystify robots and gather data on human-robot interactions. 

“As a dancer, I wanted to explore how bipedal movements could be translated to a quadruped,” Schadrack said. 

“A gift of going viral meant eliciting a wide range of comments and replies,” said Wasif Sami, another student on the course. As a group, we grappled with how our playful, performative content exists in dialogue with higher-stakes impacts of technology.

“Navigating our audience reaction taught us to consciously situate our work amidst the many uses of robots, as well as to listen openly to the discordant, plural voices on the internet.”  

The students are creating the videos as part of the university’s ‘Robots in Human Ecology’ course, designed to explore the role and ethics of robots in society and gain hands-on experience manipulating the robot for “generating ethically sound and community-engaged applications on campus.” 

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