It currently is a day of the week—which one? Doesn’t matter, but kicking back at the end of it with a cold snack is surely a great way to wind down. But who wants to get up from the couch, work-from-home desk, or patio to grab their first (or second, or third … ) brewski from the fridge or cooler? You could train your dog to grab one for you, which would take effort, time, and commitment. Or you could turn to Heineken’s new B.O.T., which is, yep, a beer-carrying robot that brings the beers to you.
Stop wondering what this has to do with cars, because the B.O.T. is kind of like a tiny self-driving car. Well, with its little cooler backpack, it’s closer to a self-driving SUV or wagon. See? Autonomy! We’re covering the future here at MotorTrend. Sit down, this is important stuff.
The B.O.T. name stands for “Beer Outdoor Transporter,” a painfully forced (if cute) acronym. It has six wheels, with its frontmost pair being notably larger than its rears—those front wheels appear to be the ones that deliver the B.O.T.’s power to the ground. A tilting display and sensor array mounted to the front of the robot affords it a stark resemblance to WALL-E, the animated trash-compacting robot from the Pixar movie of the same name.
The Heineken B.O.T. is designed to follow you around while toting up to 12 beer cans in its onboard cooler. How it does this is unclear, but we’re guessing a Bluetooth or WiFi signal pairs it to a user’s phone and, well, tracks that person down while its sensors avoid obstacles. It’s kind of like a more fun Roomba vacuum.
As if this idea needed to be even better, Heineken made it so the B.O.T. talks. It has a “charming A.I. personality” and a video the company released shows the robot asking “Hello, feeling thirsty?” Yes, you saint of a tiny beer robot, we are. So far it does not seem as if you can buy a B.O.T. of your own, but Heineken is giving one away on July 1. Before you ask: no, we don’t care that we’re basically slinging a brewer’s goofy marketing opportunity. Mostly, that’s because we don’t find this stalker ‘bot anywhere near as terrifying as those robot dogs Hyundai now owns or as unusual as that toilet-paper one Charmin came up with.
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