A robot shaped like a headless dog is now rolling through the baggage claim area of LaGuardia Airport's Terminal B. It is not there for security. Its job is to sniff the air, checking temperature, humidity, and pollutants that can build up when thousands of people pass through a building all day.
The robot was built by Skild AI, a company most business readers have never heard of but should know about. Skild AI just raised more than a billion dollars in new funding, pushing its valuation above 14 billion dollars, backed by SoftBank and Nvidia. The company does not build one robot for one job. It builds software that can run on many different robot bodies, from four-legged machines to warehouse arms, which is why the same underlying technology shows up in airports, warehouses, and data centers.
The company deploying it, ABM, is a facilities services giant with more than 9 billion dollars in annual revenue, already working in dozens of airports and buildings. This is not a small experiment by an unknown vendor. If the pilot proves out, ABM has both the reach and the client list to roll it out fast, at Terminal B and well beyond it.
The reasoning behind the pilot is straightforward. Airport touch points, door handles, handrails, bathroom fixtures, get used constantly and are expensive to clean by hand often enough to matter. LaGuardia Gateway Partners, which manages the terminal, argues that robots let the same cleaning staff double the frequency of these tasks, which changes the return on investment for the whole cleaning contract.
Alongside the dog robot, ABM is running two other machines: a robotic vacuum and a robotic floor scrubber, made by a company called CenoBots. These look nothing like animals. They just clean, using cameras and a laser-based sensor called lidar to avoid people and objects while they work.
The bigger backdrop here is a labor shortage, not a labor replacement story. The cleaning industry in the United States has struggled with high turnover and a shortage of workers for years, and government projections show janitorial job openings growing only slightly over the next decade. Facilities companies are not necessarily cutting headcount with these robots. They are trying to stretch a workforce that is hard to hire and hard to keep.
There is a real privacy question sitting underneath the cute robot dog framing. The device does carry a camera and streams video to a laptop on site, even though ABM says it is not used for surveillance. The robot's resemblance to Boston Dynamics's well known Spot robot, a machine that has drawn privacy concerns in other public deployments, means airports adopting these devices should expect questions from travelers and advocacy groups about what is actually being recorded and who can access it.
For any business running a large public facility, mall, hospital, stadium, or office campus, this pilot is worth watching closely over the next year. The technology is not experimental anymore. The bigger open question is whether it holds up outside a demo, and whether the public stays comfortable with it once the novelty wears off.