Heineken BOT Is An Autonomous Beer Cooler That Follows You Around

If it's summer where you live, you're likely spending many hours outdoors. A cold beer is a refreshing companion on a hot summer day, but there's a downside: having to lug around a heavy cooler full of cans. Here to solve that first-world problem is B.O.T, an autonomous cooler from beer company Heineken that can follow you around just about anywhere you go.

The Heineken Beer Outdoor Transporter (B.O.T) looks like a tiny agricultural appliance and operates like your own R2-D2 droid, only instead of helping evade Stormtroopers, it makes sure you're never too far away from a cold can of beer. The tiny robot features four wheels, two big wheels, sensors, a brain running AI, and the capacity to hold a dozen cans in addition to ice.

Is the device weird? Yes. But it's also a great example of the kind of gimmicky tech use that makes life amusing while hinting at a wildly more convenient future — though whether autonomous beer coolers will ever be part of it is likely for future generations to decide. Now for the bad news: B.O.T isn't a mass-produced product and you'll have to compete with others to win it.

On July 1, Heineken will take submissions from people who want a chance to win B.O.T. You'll need to sign up on the dedicated Heineken B.O.T website to enter for the chance to win the robot. Until then, the website is accepting interested individuals' names, emails, and birth dates to sign them up for a reminder email on July 1.

The company is short on other details about the bot, though its design indicates that it can probably handle rolling on the grass at a park, but perhaps not anything more rugged. The video shows what appears to be a small screen, as well as a speaker that allows the robot to greet its owner. It's unclear how many B.O.T units will be awarded.