This leaping $800 robotic digital camera canine crammed me with pleasure

What should you had a drone that wasn’t a buzzy, annoying fly individuals wished to swat — however reasonably a cute canine that runs and jumps? What if it may do tips on command, and movie your tips as nicely? What if it may get proper again up after a nasty-looking crash, dozens of occasions in a row?

The first time I saw Beni on Instagram, I instantly thought it was AI video slop. Surely client robots aren’t that good and agile in 2026? Then I took the actual robotic for a spin. Truth is, Beni does want work. But my first two-hour demo was a lot enjoyable, I badly need one for myself.

For roughly $600 on Kickstarter today or $800 full retail, Shenzhen-based Mondo Robotics is promoting the dream of a two-legged robotic canine that routinely follows you or your pet round. It claims that Beni can zip down the highway at practically 18 miles per hour, bounce as much as 10 inches into the air, hop up stairs, and final for as much as 1.5 hours on a cost, filming and modifying in super-stable 4K30 HDR (or 3K60, or 1080p100) because it goes.

You can management it with one or two digital joysticks within the app, or the joystick constructed into its bundled controller that may optionally strap to your wrist like a watch. Or, simply set it to comply with you from behind, aspect, or orbit round you want a drone.

I couldn’t check all of that in a single afternoon, and I’ve my doubts in regards to the “automatically” half if it’s aiming to ship this fall. In my early demo, I needed to manually activate its monitoring modes, and Beni’s twin 150-degree impediment avoidance cameras and UWB wrist tracker weren’t sufficient to maintain it from clipping corners, smacking partitions, and even working into my foot whereas making an attempt to maintain up with my kick scooter. (It did much better after I merely walked the streets of downtown Oakland.)

But I used to be floored by how steady and sturdy this bot really is. It adopted me down a number of flights of stairs, and even after I repeatedly and deliberately ran it into partitions and off ledges, it all the time bounced again with not more than a deep scuff. And sure, it actually can bounce prefer it’s obtained a pair of Speed Racer’s auto-jacks! It’s so enjoyable.

The trick is the legs. Motors within the shoulders fling the decrease legs downward, whereas spring-filled cylindrical joints soak up the shock. When my Beni landed after this spectacular bounce, it stayed on its ft — however even when it doesn’t, it instantly recovers by rotating these legs to get its wheeled ft again beneath its physique. Check out my embedded video on this story to see simply how a lot beating Beni can take and nonetheless rise up once more! (It’s additionally at YouTube.)

Beni’s obtained simply sufficient persona that I felt a little bit unhealthy slamming it into all these partitions. You can pet it on the top, and it’ll bounce or shake or coo at you whereas flashing colourful gentle (roughly 37 lux, these aren’t headlights) from its Wall-E-esque binocular eyes.

The incontrovertible fact that it may look with its head earlier than turning its physique additionally helps make Beni appears alive — and it theoretically lets Mondo get away with simply two impediment avoidance sensors that time ahead when it’s filming you from the aspect. There’s even a setting within the app that’ll let Beni rotate its head totally backwards so it may movie you from the entrance, although I didn’t have time to strive that one.

Around again, Beni has an enormous 31 watt-hour swappable battery with built-in energy button, a lined microSD slot for increasing past its 32GB of built-in storage, and a hidden USB-C port above the battery for charging and information switch.

The movable orange ears aren’t simply so you may cock them at totally different angles to offer your doggo totally different appears to be like — you may unscrew the nubs beneath every of them to reveal 1/4-inch tripod threads to connect commonplace photograph/video equipment. You also can swap out the outside wheels for indoor ones with a single pinch, although the essential package solely comes with the one set.

There’s additionally presently two further units {of electrical} contacts for future-proofing, together with 4 on the prime that may assist Mondo add a treat-tosser on your pets, and two on the backside that would allow a future dock-and-charge station on your house. Mondo says it’ll launch a 4G dongle in China that plugs into the USB-C port, so customers there can drive it remotely, and it additionally plans to supply 3D printer information for extra digital camera mounts and physique armor, like this:

It looks like there’s deliberate depth within the app for energy customers, too. Mondo advertising director Cody Skene and artistic director Ryo Miyamoto present me how one can alter Beni’s experience peak, the pitch of its digital camera and the diploma of its stabilization, how rapidly Beni strikes and turns, even the curves of its joysticks.

And whereas Mondo isn’t essentially making a full twin-stick controller of its personal, Miyamoto exhibits me how Beni can work with third-party controllers, too, handing me a full-fat racing transmitter and a pair of Xreal glasses he’s rigged as much as Mondo’s app for FPV management. He says it’s much more enjoyable with the Logitech G29 racing wheel he’s obtained at house, saying that it may plug proper right into a cellphone, and thus into Mondo’s app, so long as you’ve obtained a option to energy it. He’s obtained an enormous exterior battery for that.

This is a Kickstarter undertaking from a comparatively unknown startup, so the standard caveats apply: it’s all the time attainable it’ll by no means ship, or by no means ship to you, getting caught in certification or customs limbo like some tasks do. While this isn’t a flying drone, it does come from DJI veterans, although Skene assures me the corporate has no different connection to DJI and its robotic is totally manufactured in-house. He says he’s assured Beni will ship this fall.

After a pair hours with Beni, my takeaway is that this: even when it doesn’t fulfill the follow-me dream to the diploma its advertising movies present, it’s not like many different corporations are constructing a self-balancing, self-righting, leaping R/C toy with a built-in 4K digital camera that my children will wish to pet. If there isn’t some deadly flaw by the point it hits manufacturing, this one’s occurring my Christmas wishlist.