San Francisco company offering $20 an hour to walk robot dogs

Oct. 28 (UPI) — A San Francisco tech startup posted a job listing offering $20 to dog walkers willing to spend four to six hours walking robot dogs.

The company, Dimensional, said in the since-deleted listing in the Bay Area Jobs group on Facebook that the robot dog walkers would be required to spend at least four hours walking computer-brained canines through public areas in the city.

The listing said applicants should be comfortable “safely handling equipment weighing about 33 pounds,” as walkers would be required to carry any robot dogs that broke down back to the company’s address — appropriately located in the Dogpatch neighborhood.

Stash Pomichter, Dimensional’s founder, said the company is working to develop an open-source operating system for robots to perform rigorous physical labor. He said initial tests found AI agents were less effective at controlling the robots than human operators, explaining the human-assisted dog walks were aimed at gathering more data.

“What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,” Pomichter told The New York Times. “And humans are still needed in the loop.”

The company’s robot dogs were purchased from a Chinese company called Unitree for $2,000 each.