Today, you can buy almost anything with a few clicks on your phone. Online shopping has created millions of small deliveries, and a lot of them could be handled more efficiently if humans had a little mechanical help. That’s where delivery robots come in.
They are unlikely to replace delivery workers entirely as they still need human supervision, but that’s not necessarily the point. The idea is to let them take over some of the repetitive work and short-distance trips, and existing delivery robots already seem quite good at doing that.
The problem is the last 100 meters to the destination. It doesn’t sound like much, but those final few steps usually involve staircases, curbs, uneven ground, and other obstacles that wheeled robots struggle with. California-based company Robot.com has introduced a new robot designed to handle those obstacles easily.
Robot.com
Robot.com has been developing robots since 2017 and has several models in its catalog, including the smaller R-kiwi for campus food and small package deliveries, the larger R-cargo for warehouses and industrial-scale logistics, and the humanoid R-noid, designed to assist with tasks around the house, such as cooking and folding laundry.
The company’s new model is called R-dog. It’s a four-legged delivery robot with a friendly-looking design, a furry tail, and wheels on its feet for quickly and efficiently traversing flat terrain. Instead of relying entirely on those wheels, though, this robot has flexible legs and can bend its knees to deal with obstacles like curbs and stairs along the way.
The cargo compartment essentially forms the “body” of R-dog. It’s designed to be large enough to fit multiple packages at once, including food orders and standard parcels.
Robot.com
The delivery itself is one of the most interesting parts of the design because there is no need for a person to meet the robot and take the package from it. When R-dog reaches its destination, it opens the rear wall of the cargo compartment, allowing the package to slide out, and then continues on to its next destination.
Yes, it does look exactly like R-dog poops your package out. The creators don’t explain, though, how the robot identifies which package to release if it’s carrying more than one at the same time.
Robot.com
But delivery isn’t the only purpose R-dog is designed for. Expensive hardware can be tricky to justify financially if the robot’s only function is to deliver sandwiches, so the creators found a way to turn R-dog into an advertising platform.
The robot has two digital screens, one on each side of its body, allowing it to display advertisements while moving around.
Billboards or cars with ads on them don’t draw much attention anymore – we are so used to seeing dozens of those every day. But a robotic dog rolling down the street would be pretty hard to ignore. You’d most probably stop, take a picture, maybe shoot a video, and share it on social media. And that’s exactly why this advertisement would be quite effective.
Robot.com
Robot.com even has its own advertising platform called R-ads. It allows the company to remotely upload and manage ads displayed on its robots and even measure interactions. The company has also developed its own fleet-management platform called REMI, and all of the company’s robots operate on it, which makes it easy to integrate new designs.
“When we wanted to add a quadruped, we didn’t need to build a new operational system from the ground up. We built R-dog to run on what already exists, and that is what makes launching a new robot form factor possible at the pace we move,” explains CEO and Co-Founder Felipe Chavez Cortes.
Robot.com
Another fun feature of R-dog is its built-in conversational audio, so it can respond to people in real time. Because it’s not the robot’s primary purpose, we imagine it’s probably pretty basic, but having a conversation with a robotic dog still sounds quite entertaining.
R-dog’s commercial deployment is planned for 2027. Robot.com hasn’t disclosed pricing for its robots publicly, nor has it provided much technical detail about the new model. This leaves us with quite a few questions, with the main one being: does R-dog genuinely make deliveries more efficient, or is it a new smart way to get people to stop and look at ads? It definitely could be both.
Meet R-Dog | Robot for Delivery & Advertising
Source: Robot.com
