The new R-dog delivery robot hopes to replace your local gig-workers with a friendly face, red cap, approachable design, and even furry tail – all cute and adorable, until it poops your package onto your porch.
Oh, and it runs ads the entire time.
If losing your job to an autonomous dog robot isn’t quite dystopian enough for your tastes, have you considered putting a furry tail, MAGA red hat, and two TVs that run nothing but ads on it? Robot.com certainly have, and they’re hoping that the robot’s expressive “eyes” and chunky aesthetics of the R-dog delivery robot concept they unveiled earlier this week will make it a welcome sight on city streets in the near future.
Once there, the R-dog’s makers claim their robot’s ability to go up and down stairs and navigate low barriers more quickly and effectively than many of the boxier delivery ‘bots currently in the market will enable it to reach more finals destinations more easily, reducing the need for more manual handoffs and enabling more companies to ultimately automate bigger chunks of their human delivery operations.
R-dog’s furry tail
The company’s real differentiator, though, is the R-dog’s approachable design. In addition to giving it Wall-E style, expressive “eyes” and sticking a furry tail on the back, Robots.com says the R-dog is capable of “natural voice conversations” with passers-by – technology that could lead, its makers suggest, to more flexible and interactive ad campaigns.
And, make no mistake, advertising is a big part of the company’s pitch. R-dog’s on-board cameras and sensors, then, aren’t just for navigating its surroundings – they’re also clocking people’s faces, counting who is engaging with the robot’s ad-playing screens and, I assure you, running at least some degree of sentiment analysis on them.
Out-of-home advertising has always run on estimated reach. R-Ads measures impressions, interactions, and dwell time per robot, so brands get actual engagement data on the go with a real-time dashboard.
It’s unclear how (or even if) the R-dog would handle multiple deliveries along a single route, but to their credit, Robot.com does a fair job addressing some of the privacy concerns that come along with this sort of public recording in the Flock era.
The company cites limited data retention windows with strictly-controlled internal access to PII and other customer data, and suggests that individuals can request to access, correct, or delete their personal data, or opt out of certain disclosures via email. It’s not entirely clear how a passer-by would know to email the company to request that sort of deletion, but sending a preemptive request to legal@robot.com seems like a great place to start in case you find yourself walking past one of these.
The motivations behind the red cap are similarly unclear, but maybe it’s not as noticeable as I think it is (to a hammer, the world seems full of nails). You can watch the company’s own video, showing the R-dog navigating sections of Miami Beach, below, then let us know what you think of Robot.com’s latest offering in the comments.
Making sure “furry” makes it into the SEO
SOURCE | IMAGES: Robot.com, via NewAtlas.
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