The creator of the Roomba is back with a furry robotic companion

Colin Angell, the maker of the Roomba and the man who helped create it 50 million home robots To people’s homes, he is back with a new robot. But this is designed to be a companion, not a cleaner.

The first robot from the new company Angle, Familiar machines and magicis a dog-sized robotic pet that looks like a cross between a bear, a barn owl, and a golden retriever. He has an expressive face, with moving eyebrows, ears and eyes, and the company calls him “Familiar,” a name meant to evoke folklore around the idea of ​​a supernatural companion. Based on a demo video I saw before it came out on Wall Street Journal The future of everything At a conference this week, a four-legged robot can move around your home on all fours autonomously, like a pet.

The Familiar is a “physically embodied AI system” that will use generative AI, via an on-device model, to interact with its owner with the goal of forming an emotional connection and developing a “distinct personality,” Angel told me in an interview. In theory, robots that can interact and respond to humans should be more effective in what Angel calls “high human connection roles,” such as companionship, entertainment, hospitality, smart home, elder care, and parental support. “The next era of robotics is not just about human dexterity or form, it is also about machines that can build and maintain human connection,” says Angel.

The first Familiar animal, codenamed Ami, won’t be available for purchase until next year at the earliest, and will cost “about the same as pet ownership,” Angel said. Its exact features are also still under wraps, but Angle says initial use cases focus on families with young children, companionship for the elderly, and problem solving. The global epidemic of loneliness. It’s a bold move for a man who built his career on floor-cleaning robots.

Angel says his three-decade career in robotics led to this moment. The original name of iRobot, founded in 1990, was Artificial Creatures Inc. But at that time, the technology needed to create artificial life did not exist. “Finally, I get to do what I originally set out to do. It’s not just about building cool animatronics. Now is the time to have the technology – if used correctly and responsibly – to start creating Familiars.”

After iRobot Failed to sell to Amazoncorner He steps down as CEO in 2024. Since then, he and Familiar Machines Angle founders, along with co-founders (and iRobot veterans) Ira Renfro and Chris Jones, have assembled a team of roboticists and engineers from Disney, MIT, Boston Dynamics, Amazon, Bose, and Sonos. Their goal is to create a robot that is not just a toy or a chatbot that is placed in a piece of plastic, like we do I saw it everywhere at CES this year.

From the beginning, the team rejected the idea of ​​a humanoid robot, believing it to be unnecessarily complex to achieve their purpose. Ami is an intentionally unrecognizable creature because, says Angel, if you create a certain animal or form factor, people will have preconceived notions about its abilities.

They also decided not to have the usual talk. Instead, they will make non-verbal sounds, with the two units featured in the Wall Street Journal’s “The Future of Everything” making meowing and purring sounds. “By design, it will avoid giving realistic advice about things that it probably shouldn’t be giving realistic advice about,” Angel says, pointing to the hot waters that LLM-powered chatbots continue to get into.

Primary communication will be through expression and body language, aided by a camera-based vision system and microphone array. With 23 degrees of freedom, the robot can move its head, neck, ears, eyes and eyebrows, and walk at a slow human pace, but it cannot grasp objects or climb stairs. Its four legs provide stability, helping overcome concerns about the robot falling and damaging property or injuring people.

Familiar Machines’ goal is to use artificial intelligence to create a robot that can learn from its owners, remember patterns, and adapt to their routines, with the goal of promoting long-term engagement, Angel says. They want to avoid getting stuck in a closet or falling victim to the fate of dozens of previous home robots (see Gebo, Ibo, Victor, Astroetc.). “If this is a game, we’ve failed,” Angel says. “If this is the creature you want in your world, then we have knocked it out of the park. It is one way or another.”

The Familiar is powered by Nvidia Jetson music chip. “Its embedded AI suite is powered by a small custom multimodal model optimized for social reasoning, combining vision, sound, language and memory to create socially responsive behaviors in real time,” Angel says. It does not require an Internet connection, although it can be connected, and does not stream audio or video to the cloud, a purposeful design decision to protect privacy and improve latency. However, it is still a device with cameras and microphones in your family space.

Physical AI for human communication?

So why would anyone want this robot in their home? While Angel is shy about talking details, since the robot is still in development, he says an AI-powered companion could help address the problem. An increasing problem of loneliness Providing an alternative to the technology that keeps us glued to screens.

“If Familiar gets you out of your room and walking around, that’s a real way to try to address isolation and loneliness,” he says. So far, Angel says, most attempts at companion robots fail the “glass plate” test. “If a piece of glass between you and the device doesn’t change your experience, it should just be a screen.” That’s why Ami is designed to interact with you, including pushing and cuddling you. It also has a “luxury” coating that is sensitive to the touch, says Angel.

The demo video I watched for Ami showed a boy putting down his tablet to pet it, a man deciding to stop scrolling and go to bed after a nudge from the robot, an older woman walking with Ami, and a younger woman doing yoga next to him. The idea is that if you’re encouraged to do things other than being on screen or sitting alone at home, you’ll be more likely to interact with other people.

While more non-screen interactive technology could be an antidote to our screen-obsessed society, it is a very weak link to more human interaction. It’s going to take more than a robot pet to disconnect my teenager from TikTok. And it’s still the robot, not the human you’re interacting with. By offering a substitute for some aspects of human companionship, they can easily become as great a barrier to real social interaction as screens.

Assuming Angel and his team are able to pull off the robotic and personal parts, success will still depend largely on how consumers respond to bringing a robot into their homes. How much does it cost? The first Roomba was a huge success because it cost less than $200 and vacuumed the floor. The “costs of pet ownership” are a surprisingly wide range. While Angle claims that interest in the Familiar is “higher than we’ve seen with the Roomba,” the lack of a clear goal seems to be an issue.

The strongest use cases that Angle alluded to are as a parent support tool — a device that interacts with your kids when you can’t and is better than a tablet or TV screen — and as a support for seniors, helping relieve loneliness and managing medication and mobility routines. The latter resembles one of the few successful companion robots to date, Intuition Robotics ElliQ. (The corner is on the company’s board of directors.)

Many people will look at this familiar concept and say, “I’d rather have a real dog or a real cat.” As a devoted pet owner, I know that I would rather cuddle my cat, walk my dog, or spend time with my chickens than with a machine. Angel points out that there are many reasons why people do not own pets, as he shared a statistic claiming pet ownership It drops to just 9 percent after age 68When it becomes difficult for someone to care for an animal. For those who want an animal companion but can’t get one for whatever reason, Familiar can be an interesting alternative.

Angle showed two of the family members on stage at a Wall Street Journal conference, showing them moving, walking and interacting with people, making meowing and purring sounds. The units were partly under operator control. Angle didn’t say to what extent, but he says Familiar will be fully autonomous by the time it launches next year. “This is a demo, but it’s a demo on its way to the product; we’re already in the factories,” he told the audience.

Even then, it’s unclear how close she will come to seeing Angel. These are very big promises in an industry full of failures and high expectations, and all we’ve seen so far are strictly controlled demos. What is clear is that Angel believes his team has already made great strides toward their vision of creating artificial life. “It’s not a toy,” he says. “It’s a real robot.” “There are enough things that make her beautiful, nice to pet and hug, and she can keep up with you. It’s agency. By some definition of life, it’s alive.”