From Roomba Pioneer, Your New Pet Robot Overlord

The robotics pioneer who helped unleash the Roomba vacuum is now betting that you might one day replace your beloved dog or cat with a plush robot that follows you around your home and adapts to your daily habits. Colin Angle unveiled a four-legged prototype of that artificial pet, called the Familiar, on Monday, reports the AP. Imagine a creature the size of a bulldog with doe-like eyes and bear cub ears and paws, extending itself into a greeting stretch that invites you to pat its touch-sensitive fake fur. "We chose a form factor that's not a human, not a dog, not a cat, because we wanted to steer away from all of those preconceptions," said Angle, who leads the startup Familiar Machines & Magic and before that was longtime CEO of Roomba maker iRobot.

This kind of lifelike machine—powered by the latest artificial intelligence technology—would not have been possible when Angle co-founded iRobot in 1990 or launched the first Roomba in 2002. It's hardly the first effort to build a pet-like household robot. Japanese electronics giant Sony, for one, famously introduced a small plastic robotic dog called Aibo in the late 1990s and rebooted the concept in 2018. But Angle believes the Familiar achieves something that "simply hasn't existed before." "The challenge is to make something that's not a watch-me toy," Angle says. "This is about having something that you want to hug, you want to pet. When it's happy, that makes you happy. And it is large enough or mobile enough to follow you to the kitchen or drag you off the couch and take a walk."

Angle said the robot makes emotive, animal-like sounds but doesn't talk. But, mimicking a real pet, it has audio input "ears" and an AI system that can understand and learn from what you say to it. It benefits from the advances in generative AI sparked by chatbots like ChatGPT and can gradually adapt its behavior as it learns from the people around it. "I couldn't have done this six months ago," Angle said. It could take a while before Angle starts selling the machines, but one target demographic is retired people who are past the peak age of pet ownership. "Not because people suddenly stop enjoying pets, but the fear and obligation of caring for them are such that people are very reluctant to get new pets at older ages," Angle said.