"Carry" Is a Sweet Li'l Robot to Deliver Your Late-Night Pad Thai

Impact

Imagine having an adorable robot deliver everything from your lunch to your laundry. 

That's the goal of a company called Dispatch, which is currently piloting a sweet little delivery bot called Carry at two universities in California. 

The 3-foot-tall self-driving robot has several different compartments to hold individual deliveries, each of which can be unlocked using an smartphone app. Like autonomous cars still in development at Tesla and Google, Carry can navigate sidewalks and pedestrians. Traveling at 4 mph, the robot isn't likely to do much damage. 

In total, Carry can cart around 100 pounds of stuff — laundry, groceries or those egg rolls you were craving from the Chinese spot down the street. 

Mic/YouTube

The concept isn't far off from the delivery drones Amazon is currently working on. With regulatory approval, the Everything Store wants to start allowing drones to make quick-order deliveries straight from its warehouses. 

Meanwhile, Carry serves a function a bit more akin to now-deceased services like Wunwun and eBay Now — one-stop apps that can deliver whatever you want, whenever you want. 

YouTube

Rather than sell its bots, Dispatch wants companies to pay to use Carry, according to Fortune. For now, Dispatch is talking with unknown on-demand delivery services. In the meantime, you can see Carry rolling around Menlo College and California State University, Monterey Bay.