When a Robot Dog Competes with Real Dogs

Advances in robotics have given us robots that act so real they are creepy. But how good are they, really? Could a consumer-grade robot ever fool anyone? No, but they can impress us in their own way. Zac Alsop got the idea to pit a computerized companion dog against real dogs in a competition, so he splurged on a Unitree Go1 robotic dog, although not the most expensive model. Even the bottom-line model is quite expensive. This robot is remote-controlled but also AI-enabled.

Anyway, Zac enlisted a dog trainer, a robot expert, and a dance instructor on his way to entering his "dog" in a canine freestyle (dancing) competition. But what starts out promising to be an epic experiment quickly turns into a comedy of errors, as Zac's failures along the way are rather funny and make the video what it is. He encounters a steep learning curve in "training" his robot and getting it into the competition. After all that, it really doesn't matter whether he wins or not, since nobody is taking him the least bit seriously.