The delivery-robot company that pivoted to humanoids — and rents them by the month

Robot.com — the American company whose Kiwibot machines have been trundling along US pavements with food deliveries for years — has launched a humanoid. R-noid was shown at the Automate trade show in Chicago and presented not as a research platform but as a product available now. The design is deliberately unambitious about legs. R-noid is a humanoid torso with two 7-degree-of-freedom arms on a 4-degree-of-freedom trunk that raises and lowers the working height from the floor to about 1.9 metres, carried on a holonomic wheeled base that slides sideways in tight aisles. Almost none of the intelligence is built in-house: navigation comes from FieldAI, manipulation from Physical Intelligence's π0.7 model, the computing from NVIDIA Jetson modules, and the expressive head from the Japanese studio Yukai Engineering. What is genuinely different is the commercial model. R-noid is not sold. It is rented, in the same subscription arrangement Robot.com already uses for its delivery and cargo robots, and the company claims eight to twelve weeks from a first site survey to a robot working on its own. Five job profiles were offered at launch — restaurant assistant, packer, picker, folder and host — aimed at hospitality, warehousing, healthcare and events rather than at the car plants where most humanoid pilots have gone. The caveats are the usual ones. Robot.com has published no height, weight, payload, battery capacity, runtime or price, and its claim of "Level 4" autonomy is marketing language rather than a certified standard. Confirmed deployments amount to a packer at a golf course and a second unit heading into a food plant. Whether renting a humanoid turns out to be easier to sell than buying one is the question the next year will answer.