Robot guard dogs are moving from experiments to serious business. Asylon Robotics has signed a $17 million, five-year deal with security giant Securitas to deploy autonomous robot dogs and aerial drones at critical infrastructure facilities.
As far as I can tell, this could be the biggest robot security deal ever. In this episode of NEXT with John Koetsier, I chat with Asylon CEO Damon Henry about the big deal, why autonomous security robots are finally proving their value, and what the future of security looks like for mission-critical and national security facilities.
Asylon already has more than 50 robots deployed across the US, using Boston Dynamics Spot quadrupeds, autonomous aerial drones that they make themselves, custom security hardware, and a 24/7 robotic security operations center.
We discuss:
- How Asylon’s $17M Securitas deal came together
- How robot dogs and aerial drones work together to secure facilities
- Why customers are seeing reductions in crime and vandalism
- How autonomous robots work alongside human security guards
- Why Asylon builds some hardware and buys other components
- The potential for humanoid robots in security and inspection
- What large-scale deployments mean for the ROI of robotics
Damon also shares real-world results from customer deployments, including Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, where robot patrols have helped protect human guards while improving security outcomes.
Transcript: biggest robot security deal ever?
Asylon: Robot guard dogs and the future of security
John: We’re investing billions, hundreds of billions, in general-purpose robots. Some are humanoids, some are quadrupeds, and some have other forms. They fly, they roll, they do all kinds of things. But we haven’t always proved out the value proposition for many of them yet.
Maybe now that’s changing.
Asylon Robotics just signed one of the largest robotic security deals in history, and we’re chatting with CEO Damon Henry.
Welcome, Damon. How are you doing?
Damon: Doing great. Thanks for having me.
John: Super pumped to do this. Give us an overview. What’s the deal about?
Damon: We signed a $17 million, five-year deal with Securitas, which is one of the largest guarding providers in the world, to roll out robotic security with both robot dogs and aerial drones for some of their critical infrastructure customers.
It’s one of the largest, if not the largest, security robotics deals we’ve seen in the space so far, and it builds on some earlier deals we were doing with them.
John: Give us an overview of your security system, because it is a system. There are multiple hardware components, software components, and people. Give us the 30,000-foot view.
Damon: Definitely. Asylon, at the end of the day, is a fully managed service provider in physical operations: security, inspection, and compliance.
A quick backstory: What we saw was a gap between all the amazing robots being built today and the domain expertise in areas like physical security.
What we set out to do was bridge that gap. How do you take a robot, whether it’s a humanoid, a robot dog, or a drone, and actually operationalize it for 30 missions a day, every day of the week, in the physical security domain?
We deploy a variety of robots. Today we’ve got DroneDog, which is our robotic dog platform, and Guardian, which is a drone-in-a-box platform.
We deploy those to customer sites as a fully managed service, supported by our software, which provides real-time analytics and video to customers so they can see what’s happening around their facilities.
Then we have a 24/7 Robotic Security Operations Center, or RSOC, where analysts monitor these robots as they’re deployed globally, respond to alarms and alerts, and ensure there’s a complete value chain from the robot to the end user’s needs and applications.
John: Arguably, this isn’t just a nice-to-have, right? You’ve got massive complexes and critical infrastructure. You might have a port, an energy facility, a refinery, or a mine spread out over hundreds of square kilometers.
You need something like this in the air and on the ground to manage and secure that, right?
Damon: Absolutely. What we really focus on are these no-fail missions.
Think critical infrastructure, military bases, and places that are traditionally difficult to fully protect with just people and cameras.
They’ve got hundreds of miles of fence line, sometimes over rough terrain. Or, like you said, a port that’s completely open and unable to be fenced in.
Having multiple types of robots that can become mobile sensors across that terrain fills a huge capability gap that we haven’t really been able to bridge until the advancement of AI and robotic technology.
John: It makes me think about the future of security. You can’t help thinking about the war in Ukraine and Russia when you think about these things.
The fact is that our critical infrastructure, whether in Western Europe, North America, South America, or many other parts of the world, is almost defenseless.
Maybe you’ve got a fence, but that doesn’t stop a drone from flying in. There’s so much space and there are so many soft targets out there.
Damon: Absolutely. When we started the company, we didn’t originally get into security. We just wanted to automate the space and ended up in security.
As I’ve gotten deeper into that domain, understanding the vulnerabilities of all these targets has been pretty incredible.
It’s reinforced the mission within Asylon: bringing cutting-edge technology to protect all these critical assets from threats, including drone threats.
John: Talk about the interplay between the components of your system.
You’ve got quadrupeds moving around on the ground and drones that can go in the air. Do they communicate? Do they fit together? Does one see something that another has to investigate more closely?
How does it work?
Damon: Exactly. Our ultimate goal is to be multimodal.
Every customer site is unique. Sometimes a robot dog makes sense. Sometimes it’s a wheeled robot or a flying drone, or potentially even a humanoid at some point.
Our goal is to provide a seamless software interface and user experience that delivers the data customers need from a security or inspection perspective, regardless of which type of robot is actually at the facility doing the task.
The way we do that is by enabling all the robots to communicate with each other.
We have sites where multiple dogs go out on patrol. We have sites with a drone and a dog, where maybe the drone picks something up, but you need to send the dog to investigate more closely or capture a license plate.
They have that ability to interact with each other.
From the customer’s standpoint, they can see all of that in real time in a single operating picture.
Instead of clicking through different interfaces — here’s my drone controller, here’s my dog controller — it’s all right there for them to see, with the different systems integrated into the same video feeds.
It’s pretty incredible, and we’ve found it to be very effective with our customers.
We’ve got high-end logistics customers in Southern California using both systems, where we’ve seen the crime index around their facilities drop by 13%.
We’re actively detecting thefts and robberies in real time and ultimately deterring those incidents down to zero because people know about the different types of robots moving around those facilities.
It’s been pretty incredible to see.
John: Do you build your own hardware, or do you source the best hardware you can find?
Damon: It’s a mix.
From the robot perspective, we work with the best in class. On the ground side, that’s Boston Dynamics. We’re one of the largest, if not the largest, users of Spot in the world.
On the drone side, we’re our own manufacturer and provider, mainly because of the regulatory constraints and the need to be your own OEM.
But we build everything in between.
Even though you might have the robot, you still need the security payload that provides two-way audio, night vision, and 360-degree cameras.
You need GPS modules and the autonomy stack that enables the robot to be fully autonomous at the site.
You also need things like a doghouse. We’re well known at Asylon for our super-unique names, but we’ve got a robotic doghouse the robot can return to so it’s protected during adverse weather.
We’ve seen blizzards, hurricanes — everything at this point.
We build all that hardware infrastructure around the robot.
John: And presumably charging there as well.
Damon: Absolutely. Or even automated drone battery swapping, which is something pretty unique to us.
John: Automated battery swapping?
Damon: Yeah, we automatically swap the battery.
John: Nice. It’s interesting in this build-versus-buy scenario.
Because you’re protecting critical infrastructure, and you even talked about military bases, you’ve got to be 100% certain your code stack is clean.
If you’re bidding on military contracts, you may even have to prove there’s nothing in your system that would harm national security.
Damon: Correct. Absolutely.
We’re a fully NDAA-compliant, US-built product, and the partners we work with have to comply with those requirements as well.
That’s part of the advantage of being hardware-agnostic and multimodal. We can choose partners that comply with those requirements because of the nature of the operations we’re doing.
Cybersecurity compliance is absolutely a huge component of the business.
John: I think that’s really cool because you’ve built a system where you can bring in additional form factors.
You mentioned wheeled robots, which would be faster on land. You mentioned humanoids, which give you a different security presence and visibility when dealing with people.
They also give you the ability to do things like close a gate, lock a door, or physically secure infrastructure and access points — things a dog couldn’t necessarily do and a drone can’t do.
That adds capability down the line.
Damon: Absolutely.
As the landscape continues to expand, data centers are a great example.
We’re getting pulled into data centers for security, for obvious reasons. But there’s a whole inspection use case too.
Could you open a door, check a server rack, or pull a tray out?
That’s where humanoids and other types of robots could really make sense as part of the system.
Maybe you’ve got a robot dog on the outside, but inside you’re using humanoids for inspection operations.
It’s a really exciting space with all the capabilities and use cases that are emerging.
John: I swear I got a pitch yesterday or the day before, and I’m struggling to remember the name, but it was from a quadruped security company with a new product: automated doors.
They’d attach something to an existing door so the dog could go through, come back out, and close the door.
This was for power plants, where you need doors closed to separate areas so that if there’s a fire in one, it doesn’t spread to another. There’s also physical plant security and all those considerations.
But that seems expensive to install on many different doors of many different types.
If you can get a humanoid, it can just open the door.
Damon: Correct. Exactly. Or potentially even a robot arm on a dog.
John: Yes, which Spot can do, I believe. There’s a gripper attachment. I don’t know how much of a hand it is, but there’s a gripper attachment.
Interesting. Okay, cool.
How does this work with human onsite guards?
Damon: The point of the robots is to take over the dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks.
Probably 80% of the missions we’re doing are nights and weekends.
It’s that overnight graveyard shift where someone is walking along a fence line in high grass that hasn’t been trimmed very well, with trip hazards and things like that.
Robots are really great for that.
Then you leave humans to do what humans do best: critical thinking and analysis.
In a situation with Securitas, the robots might be doing exterior patrols every 30 minutes or every hour, going around and seeing what’s happening.
If a robot finds something, it flags it for a human.
That means the human is no longer surprised by the situation. They have real-time video awareness of what’s happening and can respond more appropriately.
We’ve seen that with a customer at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, where we’ve been operating for almost four years.
We came in for the graveyard shift, and they moved their guards inside because guards were getting hurt, spit on, yelled at — you name it.
Now the robot picks up on a potential incident, the guards see what’s happening in real time, and they’re better equipped to respond.
They’re not caught off guard. They know what’s happening and can better de-escalate situations.
We’ve had huge improvements, both in terms of vandalism being driven to zero and positive engagement with the community when security events arise.
That’s been incredible to see.
John: And let’s be honest, we’ve watched a lot of movies, right?
Human security guards aren’t great at maintaining 100% awareness over eight hours of an overnight shift. We just aren’t, even the best of us.
We get bored, whereas a robot doesn’t get bored.
That’s its job. It does what it does. The electrons move, it’s got a battery, and it’s working.
Damon: Exactly.
I liken it to this: Our best day on the job is usually our first day. The robot’s worst day on the job is its first day.
It continues to get better as it learns and operates.
In the first month, it’s ramping up and learning the environment. But as it continues, the consistency becomes incredible from the robot’s perspective.
John: Cool. So what does this deal prove?
Damon: I think the future is here.
It’s not just something we’re talking about.
We’ve got more than 50 robots deployed around the country that are operating at customer sites every single day, around the clock.
A deal like this proves that the scale exists.
All this scale is with one particular customer in this announcement.
We started with two robots, proved out the technology over a year, and demonstrated the value.
With this customer, we had more than 150 security and safety incidents that the robots were involved in identifying and bringing to human attention.
It’s been a huge success.
This shows that the ROI of robots is here. There’s a functional way to do this, and people are really doubling down and investing in it now.
John: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Damon: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.