Someone in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood looked out a window last week and saw a small dog being walked down the street by a robot dog. The video went up on social media Nov. 8 and has been making the rounds since.
Stephanie Lin, who filmed it, told Storyful she was surprised and also not surprised, given how close the city sits to Silicon Valley. A person who appeared to be the owner walked a few steps behind the pair. Nobody seems to know whether this was a service being tested or one person’s weekend experiment, and nobody has said who was operating it.
It is easy to laugh at. It is also a preview of a question dog owners will keep running into. If a machine can hold a leash, what exactly is it doing?
What this means for your dog
A leash is the easy part. The job is everything else: noticing the stiffened shoulders before a lunge, or reading the other dog coming around the corner. A robot with a camera and a route can manage a sidewalk. It cannot decide that the intersection is not safe today.
It also cannot tell your dog that everything is fine. For a confident dog on a familiar block, that may not matter much. For a nervous one, a strange machine at the end of the leash is one more thing to worry about, and the desensitization work falls to you. Start with the machine parked and switched off, then work up to sound and motion.
All of this assumes your dog tolerates robots at all. Mine has spent two years feuding with the vacuum cleaner, and he is not ready to negotiate with something that walks. If your dog struggles when you leave, a stand-in companion is the more useful gadget right now.
Video and details via USA Today.