Mondo Beni Review: A Flipping Robot Camera with Terrible Obstacle Avoidance

The Mondo Robotics Beni is a small bipedal robot designed to capture and record video while users exercise. It has built-in cameras, sensors, and even lights in its eyes, allowing it to track users.

The robot self-balances and self-corrects. It can roll and follow objects specified in its app. It also performs tricks like flips: with a button press in the app, it can flip forward, backward, or sideways.

The app also lets users drive the robot remotely, move it around, and adjust the camera's pitch. After using it for several weeks, the reviewer concluded that Beni is both fun and fundamentally flawed.

Tracking is decent, but obstacle avoidance is another story. The reviewer says Beni's obstacle avoidance is absolutely terrible—so bad that he had to repeatedly check whether the robot actually had any.

He first tested in a cluttered living room, then moved to the backyard. The backyard was simple: a tree in the middle and a slope, but mostly open. When he had Beni track his dog, the robot completely lost the dog once it went behind the tree. This happened repeatedly.

He even tried having Beni track him while walking very slowly, but it still lost him. When he walked through a fence gate, Beni rolled into the fence to the left of the gate and lost him.