EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Spectrum News 1 got an exclusive look at “Spot,” a robotic dog that joined the workforce at the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo for the first time, helping take on more time-consuming and repetitive tasks, freeing up its human workforce to do more specialized tasks.

“On average, we look at more than 320,000 different points and locations where we monitor for potential fugitive emissions. It’s our way of protecting the environment,” said refinery director Frederick Walker. “So we are going to have Spot be able to be programmed to go and collect that for us, allowing the humans to then take the data to figure out where we need to go to make the actual fixes or do maintenance work.”

The oil and gas industry is part of a growing list of industries using robotic dogs to augment human work.

Boston Dynamics, which makes the Spot robot, told Spectrum News that “there are now over 1,000 out in the world taking on a number of different tasks, from collecting equipment data in industrial facilities to creating digital twins on construction sites to helping first responders safely assess potentially hazardous situations.”