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 4-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,” said Angle. 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. Angle said the robot will make emotive, animal-like sounds but won’t talk. 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. 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.
