Dimensional pays humans $20/hour to walk robot dogs in SF

Dimensional, a San Francisco startup based in the Dogpatch neighborhood, offered $20 an hour to humans willing to walk four-legged robots through the city for four- to six-hour shifts, the New York Times reported. The machines are roughly $2,000 Unitree models weighing about 33 pounds; walkers were told they might have to carry one back to the office if the equipment overheated mid-walk. No robotics experience required, paid training included. The listing ran on a Bay Area Jobs Facebook group and has since been deleted.

Founder Stash Pomichter, 26, told the Times that human operators steer the dogs while onboard cameras and sensors record the surroundings, generating what he called 'ground truth' data. Dimensional is not a hardware company: it has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the United States, China and Germany, and is building an open-source operating system meant to let AI agents control them.

'What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,' Pomichter said. The company's target applications, according to the Times, are factories, data centers, construction sites and security roles.