Dimensional
Dimensional is a San Francisco robotics software startup founded by Stash Pomichter that develops DimOS, an open-source operating system for robots. It does not build its own hardware; in October 2026 it hired people at $20 an hour to steer robot dogs through San Francisco streets to collect data for improving autonomous navigation.
Contents4 sections
Key facts
Background: Robotics software company
Dimensional, based in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood and founded by Stash Pomichter, does not build hardware itself. By October 2026 it had bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the United States, China and Germany.[1]
The company describes itself as “The open-source framework for agentic robotics” and says its team comes from MIT, CMUCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry, Berkeley, DJI and Figure.[2]
October 2026Hiring people to steer robot dogs for data
On October 5, 2026, Dimensional posted a listing for robot-dog operators to walk the robots around San Francisco for four to six hours at a time, with no robotics experience required and paid training included; operators must carry the roughly 33-pound machines back to the office if they overheat or stop working.[3]
The job paid $20 an hour. Operators steer $2,000 Unitree robot dogs with a handheld remote or a mobile app while the robots’ cameras and sensors record the surroundings, and the company uses these human navigation demonstrations to improve its autonomous systems.[4]
Pomichter said the dog-walking experiment showed that “agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,” adding that “humans are still needed in the loop.”[1]
Product: The open-source robot operating system DimOS
DimOS is distributed as the Python package dimos under the Apache-2.0 license and is labeled a pre-release beta; version 0.0.15 was uploaded on October 27, 2026. It lets developers build applications for humanoids, quadrupeds and drones without ROS, with support for the Unitree Go2 marked stable and the Unitree G1, xArm and AgileX Piper marked beta.[5]
Sources
- Wanted: Robot-dog walkers. US$20 an hour (opens in a new window)
- Dimensional Open House · Luma (opens in a new window)
- San Francisco startup offered $20 an hour to walk robot dogs for AI training: report (opens in a new window)
- Robot dogs were supposed to help humans. Now humans are being asked to babysit them (opens in a new window)
- dimos · PyPI (opens in a new window)