TL;DRRoomba creator Colin Angle unveiled the Familiar, an AI pet robot with touch-sensitive fur that adapts to your daily habits.
Colin Angle, the robotics engineer who co-founded iRobot and spent 25 years turning the Roomba into the world’s most widely adopted home robot, has unveiled the prototype for his next act: a four-legged, plush-covered AI companion designed to follow you around your house, adapt to your daily habits, and make you feel something when it greets you at the door.
The robot is called the Familiar, and the company behind it is Familiar Machines & Magic, a startup that operated in stealth mode in Woburn, Massachusetts until Angle brought a working prototype to the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference in New York on 4 May. The device is roughly the size of a bulldog, with doe-like eyes, bear cub ears and paws, and touch-sensitive synthetic fur. It makes emotive, animal-like sounds but does not talk. It has audio input that allows it to listen and learn from what you say to it, and its AI system, built on generative AI advances, gradually adapts its behaviour as it gets to know the people around it.
“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,” Angle told the Associated Press. “The challenge is to make something that’s not a watch-me toy. This is about having something that you want to hug, you want to pet. When it’s happy, that makes you happy.”
