Making deliveries from a truck to your front door could soon involve a robot dog. Robotics company Boston Dynamics is testing Spot, its canine-shaped robot, as a delivery worker that can ride trucks and jump to drop packages at customers’ doors. The delivery-focused version of Spot includes a conveyor belt. A video released by the
Making deliveries from a truck to your front door could soon involve a robot dog.
Robotics company Boston Dynamics is testing Spot, its canine-shaped robot, as a delivery worker that can ride trucks and jump to drop packages at customers’ doors.
The delivery-focused version of Spot includes a conveyor belt. A video released by the company on Tuesday shows a human worker placing packages on the conveyor belt, followed by Spot walking up to the houses and turning the belt to place them.
Robots are already carrying some deliveries most of the way to their destinations. Spot, however, is intended to address the last few feet of those deliveries: the “porch space,” as Boston Dynamics calls it.
“Much of logistics is already automated, but we believe the final frontier of logistics automation is the last 50 feet,” Marco da Silva, vice president and general manager of Spot at Boston Dynamics, said in a statement Tuesday.
Boston Dynamics said it is in talks with major logistics companies to test Spot for deliveries. The robot has previously been used for other applications, from security to site inspections, Boston Dynamics said.
Load deliveries into autonomous delivery vehicles and take them from curbs to doorsteps. are a challenge, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said last year. It’s an aspect of delivery that human workers can navigate more easily than robots, Xu said.
DoorDash has been using Dot, its autonomous delivery robot, for some deliveries in Arizona. The stroller-sized robot is small enough to fit through door frames and travel over surfaces where large cars cannot, an advantage for picking up and delivering items directly to customers’ doors, DoorDash said.
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