This jumping $800 robot camera dog filled me with joy

What if you had a drone that wasn’t a buzzy, annoying fly people wanted to swat — but rather a cute dog that runs and jumps? What if it could do tricks on command, and film your tricks as well? What if it could get right back up after a nasty-looking crash, dozens of times in a row?

The first time I saw Beni on Instagram, I immediately thought it was AI video slop. Surely consumer robots aren’t that smart and agile in 2026? Then I took the real robot for a spin. Truth is, Beni does need work. But my first two-hour demo was so much fun, I badly want one for myself.

For roughly $600 on Kickstarter today or $800 full retail, Shenzhen-based Mondo Robotics is selling the dream of a two-legged robot dog that automatically follows you or your pet around. It claims that Beni can zip down the road at nearly 18 miles per hour, jump up to 10 inches into the air, hop up stairs, and last for up to 1.5 hours on a charge, filming and editing in super-stable 4K30 HDR (or 3K60, or 1080p100) as it goes.

You can control it with one or two virtual joysticks in the app, or the joystick built into its bundled controller that can optionally strap to your wrist like a watch. Or, just set it to follow you from behind, side, or orbit around you like a drone.

I couldn’t test all of that in one afternoon, and I have my doubts about the “automatically” part if it’s aiming to ship this fall. In my early demo, I had to manually activate its tracking modes, and Beni’s twin 150-degree obstacle avoidance cameras and UWB wrist tracker weren’t enough to keep it from clipping corners, smacking walls, or even running into my foot while trying to keep up with my kick scooter. (It did far better when I simply walked the streets of downtown Oakland.)

But I was floored by how stable and durable this bot truly is. It followed me down multiple flights of stairs, and even when I repeatedly and intentionally ran it into walls and off ledges, it always bounced back with no more than a deep scuff. And yes, it really can jump like it’s got a pair of Speed Racer’s auto-jacks! It’s so fun.

The trick is the legs. Motors in the shoulders fling the lower legs downward, while spring-filled cylindrical joints absorb the shock. When my Beni landed after this spectacular jump, it stayed on its feet — but even when it doesn’t, it immediately recovers by rotating those legs to get its wheeled feet back underneath its body. Check out my embedded video in this story to see just how much beating Beni can take and still get up again! (It’s also at YouTube.)

Beni’s got just enough personality that I felt a little bad slamming it into all those walls. You can pet it on the head, and it’ll jump or shake or coo at you while flashing colorful light (roughly 37 lux, these aren’t headlights) from its Wall-E-esque binocular eyes.

The fact that it can look with its head before turning its body also helps make Beni seems alive — and it theoretically lets Mondo get away with just two obstacle avoidance sensors that point forward when it’s filming you from the side. There’s even a setting in the app that’ll let Beni rotate its head fully backwards so it can film you from the front, though I didn’t have time to try that one.

Around back, Beni has a big 31 watt-hour swappable battery with built-in power button, a covered microSD slot for expanding beyond its 32GB of built-in storage, and a hidden USB-C port above the battery for charging and data transfer.

The movable orange ears aren’t just so you can cock them at different angles to give your doggo different looks — you can unscrew the nubs underneath each of them to expose 1/4-inch tripod threads to attach standard photo/video accessories. You can also swap out the outdoor wheels for indoor ones with a single pinch, though the basic kit only comes with the one set.

There’s also currently two additional sets of electrical contacts for future-proofing, including four at the top that might help Mondo add a treat-tosser for your pets, and two at the bottom that could enable a future dock-and-charge station for your home. Mondo says it’ll release a 4G dongle in China that plugs into the USB-C port, so users there can drive it remotely, and it also plans to provide 3D printer files for additional camera mounts and body armor, like this:

It seems like there’s planned depth in the app for power users, too. Mondo marketing director Cody Skene and creative director Ryo Miyamoto show me how you can adjust Beni’s ride height, the pitch of its camera and the degree of its stabilization, how quickly Beni moves and turns, even the curves of its joysticks.

And while Mondo isn’t necessarily making a full twin-stick controller of its own, Miyamoto shows 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 up to Mondo’s app for FPV control. He says it’s even more fun with the Logitech G29 racing wheel he’s got at home, saying that it can plug right into a phone, and thus into Mondo’s app, as long as you’ve got a way to power it. He’s got a big external battery for that.

This is a Kickstarter project from a relatively unknown startup, so the usual caveats apply: it’s always possible it’ll never ship, or never ship to you, getting stuck in certification or customs limbo like some projects do. While this isn’t a flying drone, it does come from DJI veterans, though Skene assures me the company has no other connection to DJI and its robot is entirely manufactured in-house. He says he’s confident Beni will ship this fall.

After a couple hours with Beni, my takeaway is this: even if it doesn’t fulfill the follow-me dream to the degree its marketing videos show, it’s not like many other companies are building a self-balancing, self-righting, jumping R/C toy with a built-in 4K camera that my kids will want to pet. If there isn’t some fatal flaw by the time it hits production, this one’s going on my Christmas wishlist.