$20 an Hour to Walk Robot Dogs: Dimensional Develops an AI Agent Operating System for Unitree Robots

US company recruits people to walk robot dogs

Walking a robot dog pays about the same hourly wage as walking a real dog, but the robot dog needs to spend more time wandering around the sidewalks of San Francisco to complete its daily business such as "peeing and pooping." The job posting said that each dog walk takes four to six hours.

The job posting has since been deleted. It was posted on Facebook's "Bay Area Jobs" group by a startup called Dimensional. Interestingly, the company happens to be located in a San Francisco neighborhood called Dogpatch.

The job posting attracted only a handful of comments, and not one of them found anything strange about it. One mother wrote: "My son is interested in this and can start work right away." But she later said her son ultimately did not actually take the job.

Job posting

Dimensional founder Stash Pomichter said the company is developing an open-source operating system for robots. The 26-year-old hopes to embed AI agents into robots so that consumers can direct robots to complete work in the real world, just as people issue instructions to services such as Meta's agent Muse to have them complete tasks online on their behalf.

Pomichter firmly believes that people should be able to direct robots to lift heavy boxes and carry various items. "Honestly, it's too primitive that humans are still doing this physical labor today," he said in an interview.

Why walk robot dogs?

However, before robot dogs can spare humans the hassle and awkwardness of carrying groceries, Dimensional still needs to improve the robots' autonomous navigation capabilities so they can move on their own in urban environments. Therefore, the company needs to recruit robot dog walkers.

By operating and guiding a robot dog named RoboFido, they generate what Pomichter calls "ground truth" for the robots, while cameras and sensors on the robot dog record the entire dog-walking process.

After seeing someone walking a four-legged mechanical "pet" on the street, one resident remarked that San Francisco really is a strange city, and it is becoming stranger and stranger. The resident also provided a video to The New York Times.

Dimensional is not a hardware company. Pomichter said the company has purchased more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the United States, China and Germany, and is developing an operating system that can integrate with AI agents to enable these robots to act more autonomously.

Unitree robots

This month, the robot dogs the company sent people to walk cost $2,000 each and came from the Chinese company Unitree Robotics. These robot dogs can be controlled out of the box via a handheld remote control or a mobile app.

Dimensional compared the walking performance of robot dogs under human control and under AI agent control, and found that the latter's performance is still unsatisfactory.

"We found from the dog-walking experiments that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware," Pomichter said, "and humans are still needed in the loop."

Dimensional's goal is to enable robots to work in factories, data centers and construction sites, or to serve as security guards. Similar applications have already appeared: a robot dog patrols an apartment complex in Atlanta, with a human operator participating remotely from the Philippines. This robot is essentially a mobile security camera for a remote human observer.

Pomichter said he has written a program to have a robot dog patrol Dimensional's warehouse-like office at night. He gave the robot dog a prompt like this: "You are the world's best police dog," and asked it to track anyone who enters the building after midnight.

If the robot dog spots someone, it sends Pomichter a text message. He can then check the surveillance footage to determine whether the person is an employee eager to work overtime or a stranger who broke in without authorization.

This month, the robot dogs wandered around the Dogpatch neighborhood, but not everyone found it amusing. Dimensional hopes to give AI agents physical bodies in the real world.

But at the same time, more and more people are beginning to worry that more capable AI might try to kill humans. This Terminator-style horror association enraged one man. He went to Dimensional's office and then sent a disturbing text message to a company employee, claiming that these robot dogs would be used as weapons. According to a text message seen by The New York Times, the man wrote: "Have fun helping to slaughter innocent passersby, you scumbag." Dimensional subsequently reported the matter to the police.

"We'll probably have to deal with more of this in the future," Pomichter said. "By then, we may need more patrol robot dogs."