DoorDash Inc., the largest food-delivery app in the US, unveiled a delivery robot and a smart scale for restaurants, showcasing the company’s yearslong effort to develop hardware. DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang showed off the four-wheeled autonomous robot, named Dot, at a gathering Monday for reporters at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Dot stands 4-foot, 6-inches tall and uses a combination of external cameras, radars and lidar sensors on top of and below its storage compartment to perceive and navigate its surroundings. It’s one-tenth the size of a car and nimble enough to navigate through doorways and driveways, DoorDash said, but is big enough to fit six large pizza boxes and can carry up to 30 pounds of cargo. Dot can travel as fast as 20 miles per hour on bike lanes, sidewalks and roads, according to the company, which has been running an early access program for some restaurants in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona. That’s faster than the maximum speeds of sidewalk robots programmed by its partner, Coco Robotics, and Uber Eats’ partner Serve Robotics Inc. DoorDash’s electric robot uses a swappable battery that can hold as much as six hours a charge.

Full report : DoorDash unveils delivery robot Dot, standing 4-foot, 6-inches tall and able to carry up to 30lb of cargo at up to 20mph, and a smart scale for restaurants.