The man who helped put the Roomba in millions of homes thinks the next thing on the floor might be something you can hug. Colin Angle, the longtime CEO of iRobot, unveiled a four-legged prototype recently for what his new company is calling the Familiar.
The machine is roughly the size of a bulldog with big eyes, bear cub ears, and paws and touch-sensitive fake fur. When it greets you, it does a stretch.
Angle introduced the prototype on stage at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference in New York yesterday (May 4). His startup, Familiar Machines & Magic, had been operating in stealth mode out of Woburn, Massachusetts, before the debut.
The robot’s design appears to be a deliberate departure from familiar domestic animals. “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.
More than just a toy
Between early animatronic toys and later sophisticated systems, the Familiar joins a category of companion robots that has been explored for decades. While predecessors like Sony’s Aibo, a plastic, dog-like robot that was rolled out in the late 1990s and later brought back in 2018, pioneered the space, Angle argues that what he and his team put together is different in kind.
“The challenge is to make something that’s not a watch-me toy; it’s 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,” Angle explained.
The Familiar makes animal-like sounds but doesn’t talk. According to company specifications, it features audio input “ears” and an AI system that can pick up on what’s being said in the room. The system was built on top of the same generative AI advances that produced ChatGPT, and the robot can adjust its behavior over time based on the people it lives with.
With a tenure spanning about 25 years, the former iRobot CEO took the Roomba from a curiosity to the first home robot most people had ever seen. The company hit hard times more recently, largely due to pressure from Chinese competitors. Following the collapse of Amazon’s acquisition deal, Angle stepped down as chief executive and chairman in 2024 to launch Familiar Machines.
There’s no sales date yet, but Angle stated that one of the audiences he’s thinking about is older people. Not because they stop wanting pets, but because there’s hesitation about who’s going to take care of one.
The name itself draws from folklore rather than from science fiction. Familiars show up everywhere, from witches’ cats to the animal companions in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels. Angle described it as an archaic word and said he was a little surprised he was actually able to trademark it.
The minds behind the machine
The advisory bench built around the project is heavy. Marc Raibert, who founded Boston Dynamics and basically invented the modern walking robot, is on it. So is Cynthia Breazeal, the MIT roboticist behind Kismet and the tabletop robot Jibo. A lot of these names came out of the same MIT lab and share the same skepticism of the current rush toward sleek humanoid robots that are designed to walk like people but still can’t do much physical work.
Maja Matarić, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California, is also a project advisor. Twenty-five years ago, she helped launch the field of socially assistive robotics, which is exactly what it sounds like. Robots designed to provide emotional and social support.
She said her first reaction when she saw Angle’s prototype was physical. She immediately 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.
According to Matarić, whether people read the Familiar as adorable rather than creepy is going to matter a lot. She noted that decades of research into human-robot interaction have pointed in a clear direction. Robots that read as cute, personalized, and vulnerable land much better with people than the alternative.
Matarić views the form factor as especially useful in nursing homes and in mental health support settings. She emphasized that the leap to a wider audience is largely down to AI. Before generative AI, robots couldn’t really understand what people were saying.
Sources: PR Newswire, Familiar Machines & Magic, The Robot Report, AP, Washington Post