AI Robot pet mate?
The pioneer of Roomba aims to crack the household market again with an AI-powered robot Pet. Colin Angle 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 unveiled a four-legged prototype of that artificial pet, called the Familiar, on Monday. 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.” This kind of lifelike machine — powered by the latest artificial intelligence technology — would not have been possible when Colin 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 said in an interview with The Associated Press. “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.” Colin Angle said the robot will make emotive, animal-like sounds but won’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. Angle stepped down as CEO and chairman in 2024 after Amazon dropped its plan to buy the struggling Massachusetts company. Familiar Machines was born soon after and remained in “stealth” mode in Woburn, MA, Monday, when Colin brought one of his Familiar prototypes to New York for The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference. 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.
Friends for their battery life
Where do baby robotic vacuums come from?
The Woomba.
Why don’t they build nervous systems on robots?
They would rather give the robot a confident system.
I just saw a robot charging itself.
It was re-volting!
A cat owner invited their neighbor over for dinner and introduced their four cats. “That’s Alogue, Aract, Erpillar, and Astrophe,” they announced. The neighbor was surprised and asked, Where on Earth did you get those names?
Oh, those are their last names, the owner said. Their first names are Cat.
October 29th Birthdays
1973 – Gabriella Union, 1988 – Kat Timpf, 1971 – Winona Ryder, 1994 – India Eisley
1947 – Richard Dreyfuss, 1983 – Maurice Clarett, 1957 – Dan Castellaneta , 1942 – Bob Ross