Why DoorDash built its own delivery robot (www.restaurantdive.com)

At DoorDash’s Dash Forward event the company unveiled Dot, a compact, street-ready delivery robot designed to fill the gap between slow sidewalk bots and full-size autonomous cars. About one-tenth the size of a passenger vehicle (roughly 3 feet wide), Dot can travel up to 20 mph, navigate bike lanes, parking lots and sidewalks, and handle typical DoorDash payloads with a modular interior. Built for suburban reach, the robot’s removable battery supports six to eight hours of operation and hot-swapping for continuous service. DoorDash says Dot has been tested across millions of simulated and real-world miles—including road closures and blocked bike lanes—and is in early access in Greater Phoenix, with plans to reach 1.5 million people by year-end. Merchants can sign up with no upfront cost. Dot is part of a broader autonomous delivery platform that pairs robots, drones, human couriers and ML-driven routing to match orders by speed, cost, location and customer experience. DoorDash also introduced SmartScale, a kitchen-integrated weight-and-prediction system that flags missing items in real time (claiming a 30% reduction in missing-item incidents) and signals when orders are ready for pickup by driver or robot. Together, Dot and SmartScale aim to improve efficiency, order accuracy and scalability—letting DoorDash deploy a hybrid human/autonomy network optimized by machine learning demand forecasts.