The new R-dog delivery robot hopes to replace your local gig-workers with a friendly face, red cap, approachable design, and even furry tail – all cute and adorable, until it poops your package onto your porch.

If losing your job to an autonomous dog robot isn’t quite dystopian enough for your tastes, have you considered putting a furry tail, MAGA red hat, and two TVs that run nothing but ads on it? Robot.com certainly have, and they’re hoping that the robot’s expressive “eyes” and chunky aesthetics of the R-dog delivery robot concept they unveiled earlier this week will make it a welcome sight on city streets in the near future.

Once there, the R-dog’s makers claim their robot’s ability to go up and down stairs and navigate low barriers more quickly and effectively than many of the boxier delivery ‘bots currently in the market will enable it to reach more finals destinations more easily, reducing the need for more manual handoffs and enabling more companies to ultimately automate bigger chunks of their human delivery operations.

The company’s real differentiator, though, is the R-dog’s approachable design. In addition to giving it Wall-E style, expressive “eyes” and sticking a furry tail on the back, Robots.com says the R-dog is capable of “natural voice conversations” with passers-by – technology that could lead, its makers suggest, to more flexible and interactive ad campaigns.

And, make no mistake, advertising is a big part of the company’s pitch . R-dog’s on-board cameras and sensors, then, aren’t just for navigating its surroundings – they’re also clocking people’s faces, counting who is engaging with the robot’s ad-playing screens and, I assure you, running at least some degree of sentiment analysis on them.

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