DoorDash launches Dot autonomous delivery robots
DoorDash on Tuesday unveiled Dot, a red autonomous delivery robot, and began rolling the fleet out in the Phoenix metro (Mesa, Arizona). The company says Dot — built to travel in bike lanes, on roads and sidewalks and to navigate doorways and driveways — carries up to 30 pounds, can travel as fast as 20 mph, and is orchestrated by DoorDash’s AI-powered Autonomous Delivery Platform to route small-item deliveries efficiently.
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🔍 Key Facts
- Dot specs: about 5 feet tall, up to 20 miles per hour top speed, 30-pound carrying capacity
- Deployment: commercial rollout announced in the Phoenix metro with Mesa officials endorsing the partnership
- Platform detail: DoorDash’s AI Autonomous Delivery Platform decides in real time which orders should be delivered by a Dasher, a Dot, or other modes (drones/sidewalk robots)
📍 Contextual Background
- Agentic commerce describes a model in which an app (for example, ChatGPT) acts as a shopper's agent by interacting with both the buyer and the seller while the merchant processes payment and fulfills the order.
- U.S. federal law Section 230 provides online platforms with broad legal protections that allow them to make content-moderation decisions without being held liable for those decisions.
- OpenAI added an "Instant Checkout" feature to ChatGPT that lets users purchase products mentioned by the chatbot within the chat without leaving the app.
- The Instant Checkout technology was co-developed by OpenAI and payment processor Stripe.
- Amazon's "Buy for Me" feature lets shoppers request that Amazon make a purchase from a brand retailer's website on the shopper's behalf and takes customers to an Amazon checkout page to confirm order details including delivery address, applicable taxes and shipping fees, and payment method.
- Merchants pay ChatGPT a small fee on completed transactions processed via Instant Checkout.
- ChatGPT's Instant Checkout currently allows users to buy directly from U.S. Etsy sellers from within a chat.