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. 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.
鈥淲e chose a form factor that鈥檚 not a human, not a dog, not a cat, because we wanted to steer away from all of those preconceptions,鈥� said Angle, who leads the startup Familiar Machines & Magic and before that was longtime CEO of Roomba maker iRobot.
This kind of lifelike machine 鈥� powered by the latest technology 鈥� 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 . Japanese electronics giant Sony, for one, famously introduced a small plastic robotic dog called Aibo in the late 1990s and rebooted . But Angle believes the Familiar achieves something that 鈥渟imply hasn鈥檛 existed before.鈥�
鈥淭he challenge is to make something that鈥檚 not a watch-me toy,鈥� Angle said in an interview with The Associated Press. 鈥淭his is about having something that you want to hug, you want to pet. When it鈥檚 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.鈥�
Angle said the robot will make emotive, animal-like sounds but won鈥檛 talk. But, mimicking a real pet, it has audio input 鈥渆ars鈥� 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.
鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 have done this six months ago,鈥� Angle said.
Angle led for a quarter century as it turned Roomba into the first widely adopted home robot. Intense competition, especially from China, later threatened its success. 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 鈥渟tealth鈥� mode in Woburn, Massachusetts until Monday, when Angle 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.
鈥淣ot 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,鈥� Angle said.
While most robot engineers take inspiration from science fiction, the idea of a familiar has deep roots in folklore, from a witch’s cat and wizard’s owl to the animal companions in Philip Pullman’s 鈥淗is Dark Materials鈥� fantasy novels.
鈥淚t鈥檚 an archaic, ancient word,鈥� Angle said. To his surprise, he could also trademark it.
Angle has pulled together a number of prominent robotics advisers, including Marc Raibert, a pioneer of robot locomotion who founded , maker of the four-legged Spot robot; and Cynthia Breazeal, who invented the robot head Kismet and later the tabletop speaker robot Jibo, early attempts at imbuing robots with social expressions.
Many researched together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and share skepticism for the current fad of sleek that are designed to walk and move around like people but can’t yet do much useful physical work.
One of those advisers is Maja Matari膰, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California who 25 years ago co-founded the field of socially assistive robotics 鈥� with the aim of designing robots that could give people social and emotional support.
When she first saw Angle’s prototype, she said she 鈥渋mmediately got down on the ground near it and had to hug it and pet it, then started to play with it to see what it would do.鈥�
That people perceive the robot as adorable and not creepy will be key. Matari膰 said decades of research into human-robot interactions have shown that a robot that is 鈥渃ute, personalized and vulnerable is much more appealing and lovable than the alternative.鈥� It could be particularly useful in nursing homes or providing emotional support for mental health, she said.
Matari膰 said AI advances have also made it easier to broaden the impact to the general population.
鈥淏efore generative AI, robots could not readily understand what people were saying,鈥� she said.
Copyright © 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.
