A San Francisco startup called Dimensional posted a now-deleted job listing offering $20 an hour to people willing to remotely walk a robot dog through the city's streets for four to six hours at a stretch. No robotics experience was required, just a willingness to steer a roughly 33-pound machine around Dogpatch while its cameras and sensors recorded everything along the way.
The listing, reported by The New York Times, described operators controlling and steering the robot, nicknamed RoboFido in the piece, while its onboard systems captured footage of the route. Dimensional is based, fittingly, in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood, and the robots in question are made by the Chinese manufacturer Unitree, which sells the roughly $2,000 machines ready to be operated with a handheld remote or a mobile app, according to the Times. The $20-an-hour pay rate and the deleted ad were also detailed by Gadget Review.
Walking a Robot for Science, Not Exercise
The point of all that walking wasn't to tire out a mechanical pet. Dimensional founder Stash Pomichter told the Times the human-steered walks generate what he called “ground truth” data, footage and sensor readings used to train the robots to eventually navigate on their own. The company compared how the robot dogs performed under human control versus under the control of an AI agent, and, per the Times, found the AI-driven results lacking.
Per Digital Trends, the now-deleted ad asked for four to six hours of walking with no previous experience required, and warned that a walker might have to carry the roughly 33-pound robot back to Dimensional's office by hand if it overheated and stalled mid-route. That same outlet notes that Dimensional is separately developing dimOS, an open-source software platform meant to let AI agents eventually operate different robot platforms, including dogs, humanoids and robotic arms, through natural-language commands. Digital Trends adds that the project's public repository currently labels it a prerelease beta.
Humans Still Needed in the Loop
Pomichter was blunt about why people, not algorithms, are still doing the walking. “Agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,” he said, according to the Times. “And humans are still needed in the loop.” That assessment tracks with broader industry findings cited by the same report: Anthropic's own robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling robot joints directly, but performed better when directing already-trained controllers, per Digital Trends.
The Times reports that Dimensional has purchased more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the United States, China and Germany, with the stated aim of eventually putting robots to work in factories, data centers, construction sites and security roles. One example already in motion: a robot dog patrolling an apartment complex in Atlanta with a human operator based in the Philippines keeping it in check remotely, the Times reports.
Fears of Misuse and Unanswered Questions
Not everyone has reacted calmly to robots roaming city blocks. At least one person alleged the machines could be used as weapons, according to the Times, which reported that Dimensional referred the hostile messages to police.
Plenty remains unsettled about how this kind of robot deployment plays out in public space. The use of robots on city streets raises questions around pedestrian safety, privacy and the collection of video data as these machines log block after block of footage. And Dimensional's broader bet, that human-collected street data can eventually produce reliable autonomy, still has to contend with practical limits like battery life and thermal shutdowns, along with unresolved questions about insurance, public-space regulation and who bears responsibility if a robot causes harm.
