I agree it’s early enough that the tangible uses for this type of tech are still a bit blurry to us. But I also think this is a bit like saying “is there anything a car can do for me that my legs can’t do?”
It depends on what criteria you evaluate it on. Yes you can move from A to B on your own steam, of course. But automation is incremental. These things aren’t a significant obvious benefit, until they are.
Scalability is one thing. Comparing writing notes in my iPad to writing them on paper, at first glance doesn’t look much different, apart from that the iPad can effectively store a lifetime worth of notes, easily searchable, shareable, linkable etc. Its scalability potential (for this use case) is almost infinite.
When evaluating these sorts of things it’s worth bearing in mind the “leverage” that the tech might give us, that we didn’t have before. This scalability/leverage benefit is often not immediately obvious until you look a little bit below the surface.
This robot dog might start off by carrying your water bottle but later it might be able to also carry a foldable chair, a waking stick, food and water, and a communications device, suddenly meaning that someone with limited mobility can actually go out for a walk on their own and have everything they might need carried alongside them as a mobile support system. That person just gained a little bit of extra freedom. At the enhancement end of the spectrum, an athlete could use this “support robot” to extend the possible range of their training runs.
I do wonder about the near term use cases for this sort of tech (at this price point) for people with disabilities of various kinds.
Often leading edge tech starts out in the realm of compensating for disabilities for a smaller audience before progressing to being looked upon as an “enhancement” for a wider audience (because it becomes affordable enough and useful enough to start to appeal to people who don’t need to compensate for any particular issue but see it as a net convenience worth paying for).
While $2700 is way out of my price range -- handicapped people tend to have tight budgets -- I can absolutely see a tremendous market for companion animals for people allergic to animals, with a dog phobia etc.
Especially if they could add some fetching capabilities, this could be enormously useful to many people. Our population is aging and unlike other populations with physical limitations, people whose limitations are primarily age related sometimes have money. Sometimes lots of money in fact.
Battery life has a tendency to change over time. For someone largely housebound, it wouldn't much matter. They could be on a tether plugged into a wall even and still do good things for many people.
I can see where the miscommunication comes from, but I think my point stands. For handicapped people, a mechanical dog that can carry, fetch items for them, help them get up, light their way, etc is potentially very useful.
Apply that here and you can bet that "florida robot dog does stupid thing" will be a headline in the future.
I admire your optimism!
As far as we know, the answer to that question is zero, unless you might count a missile as an autonomous flying robot (but even that still has to be launched by human).
But if you live in car dominated sprawl then idk.
It could also be an effective scarecrow I imagine. When planting certain things it would be nice to reliably keep the birds and varmint away.