DoorDash has a robot that can traverse sidewalks and roads to deliver dinner to your door.
Importantly, the company says, it’s also cute.
On Tuesday, DoorDash unveiled Dot, its latest self-driving delivery robot. The vehicle sports a red exterior, can carry up to 30 pounds of cargo, and is roomy enough to fit up to six pizza boxes at once. Dot also includes lidar sensors and cameras that are already helping it navigate streets and sidewalks in parts of Phoenix as it makes deliveries from restaurants and Dashmart.
Dot has LED lights that look like eyes and the ability to greet restaurant workers with an “Oh, hello!” as it pulls up to retrieve an order, executives at DoorDash said.
“Beyond the tech details, we’ve also put a lot of thought into the personality and character of Dot,” Ashu Rege, vice president of autonomy and head of DoorDash Labs, said at an event in San Francisco on Monday to unveil the robot. “We really love how cute this little robot is.”
Look online, and you’ll find evidence that DoorDash might be onto something with its focus on cuteness.
One video posted last month on TikTok shows a robot from startup Coco Robotics — which has worked with DoorDash on some autonomous deliveries — trying to cross a street. In the video, a woman can be heard cheering the robot on.
“Oh my god, don’t hit Coco,” the woman says in the video as the robot avoids colliding with cars. “Coco just wants to cross the street.”
Dot is the latest self-driving vehicle to take to the streets and perform a task that’s currently done by human gig workers.
Earlier this year, Uber started offering rides in Waymo’s autonomous vehicles in Atlanta and Austin. Waymo has offered rides in other cities, such as Phoenix and San Francisco, for years through its own app.
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Delivering food and other goods through self-driving vehicles is harder, as DoorDash has said before. While rideshare riders can walk up or down a block to get to their robotaxi, getting a burrito or salad into such a vehicle requires more coordination with restaurant workers.
At DoorDash’s San Francisco headquarters on Monday, company executives said that Dot’s design attempts to make that coordination easier.
While existing delivery robots are limited to driving on sidewalks, for example, Dot can switch between hitting speeds of up to 20 miles an hour on roads and slower rates for navigating sidewalks. Videos that DoorDash showed at the event to unveil Dot showed the robot traveling in the bike lanes on roads.
The vehicle weighs 350 pounds, according to DoorDash. It stands four and a half feet tall and, at 29 inches, is slightly wider than many baby strollers.
With those dimensions, Dot can pull right up to a restaurant entrance, allowing a worker to place orders directly inside its protective shell. The robot’s size means that it could also fit through many doorways in future use cases, Rege said.
“It’s a much different technical and operational challenge than ride-hail,” Stanley Tang, one of DoorDash’s co-founders and its chief product officer, said. “People want deliveries right to the door. Solving that last 10 feet isn’t optional.”
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