Roomba pioneer aims to crack the household market again with an
AI-powered pet robot
[May 05, 2026] By
MATT O'BRIEN
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.
“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, who leads the startup Familiar Machines & Magic and before that
was longtime CEO of Roomba maker iRobot.
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.
It's hardly the first effort to build a pet-like household robot.
Japanese electronics giant Sony, for one, famously introduced a small
plastic robotic dog called Aibo in the late 1990s and rebooted the
concept in 2018. But Angle believes the Familiar achieves something that
“simply hasn’t existed before.”
“The challenge is to make something that’s not a watch-me toy,” Angle
said in an interview with The Associated Press. “This is 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 said the robot will make emotive, animal-like sounds but won’t
talk. But, 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.
“I couldn’t have done this six months ago,” Angle said.
Angle led iRobot 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 “stealth” 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.
“Not 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,” Angle said.
[to top of second column] |
Familiar, an AI pet robot, interacts during a demonstration at the
Massachusetts-based startup Familiar Machines & Magic, Wednesday,
April 29, 2026, in Woburn, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
 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 “His Dark Materials” fantasy novels.
“It’s an archaic, ancient word,” 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
Boston Dynamics, 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
humanoid robots 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 Matarić, a computer science professor
at the University of Southern California who 25 years ago co-founded
the field of socially assistive robotics — with the aim of designing
robots that could give people social and emotional support.
When she first saw Angle's prototype, she said 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.”
That people perceive the robot as adorable and not creepy will be
key. Matarić said decades of research into human-robot interactions
have shown that a robot that is “cute, personalized and vulnerable
is much more appealing and lovable than the alternative.” It could
be particularly useful in nursing homes or providing emotional
support for mental health, she said.
Matarić said AI advances have also made it easier to broaden the
impact to the general population.
“Before generative AI, robots could not readily understand what
people were saying,” she said.
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved
 |
