Some San Francisco sidewalks have had an odd sight lately: people walking robot dogs for pay.
The job
Dimensional, a startup in the Dogpatch, posted a $20-an-hour listing for “Robot-Dog Walkers” in the Facebook group Bay Area Jobs, according to SFist and Quartz, both citing the New York Times. The ad called for four to six hours of walking on city sidewalks, and no experience was needed. Applicants had to be comfortable handling equipment of about 33 pounds. If a robot overheated mid-walk, the walker had to carry it back to the office. The post has since been deleted, Quartz said.
Why robot dogs need walkers
Human handlers steer the machines while cameras and sensors record the surroundings. That gives researchers a baseline to compare with movements directed by AI, SFist reported. Founder Stash Pomichter, 26, told the Times the company has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots. The dogs are made by Chinese company Unitree and cost about $2,000 each.
“What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,” Pomichter said. “And humans are still needed in the loop.”
A backlash
A man recently visited the company’s Dogpatch office and later sent threatening text messages to an employee, accusing the company of building robots that would be used as weapons, SFist reported. Dimensional reported the messages to police.