The maker of Roomba is back with its furry robot companion

Colin Angle, the creator of Roomba is the person who helped install it 50 million home robots in people’s homes, he’s back with a new robot. But this one was designed as a companion, not a cleaner.

The first robot from Angle’s new company, Known Machines & Magicis a dog-like animal that looks like a cross between a bear, an owl, and a golden rabbit. It has a realistic face, with movable eyebrows, ears, and eyes, and the company calls it “Known,” a name meant to evoke myths surrounding the idea of ​​a spiritual companion. Based on a preview video I saw ahead of its appearance on WSJ’s Future of Everything This week’s meeting, a quadruped robot can walk around your house on all fours by itself, like a pet.

Notable is a “physical AI system” that will use artificial AI, via a device interface, to interact with its owner with the goal of creating a connection and developing a “different personality,” Angle told me in an interview. Robots that can interact and respond to people should be more useful in what Angle calls “high-level human interaction roles,” such as social interaction, entertainment, hospitality, smart home, elder care, and parental support. “The next era of robotics isn’t just about technology or humanoid features — it’s about machines that can create and maintain human connections,” Angle says.

Codenamed Ami, the First Known won’t be available for purchase until next year at the earliest, and the cost is “similar to pet ownership,” Angle said. The exact details are still under wraps, but Angle says the initial cases focused on families with young children, socializing with the elderly, and managing the elderly. Loneliness is a global epidemic. It’s a bold move for a man who made a career out of floor-cleaning robots.

Angle says his decade-long career in robotics has led to this moment. The original name of iRobot, which was founded in 1990, was Artificial Creatures Inc. But at that time, the ability to create artificial life did not exist. “Finally, I got to do what I wanted to do in the first place. It’s not just about making great movies. Now is the time when the technology is there – if it’s used properly and properly – to start making great ones.”

After iRobot failed to sell on AmazonMine he stepped down as CEO in 2024. This time, he and the founders of Angle Machines, along with co-founders (and iRobot veterans) Ira Renfrew 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 beaten in plastic, like we do. seen everywhere at CES this year.

From the get-go, the group rejected the idea of ​​a humanoid robot, believing it to be unnecessarily complicated for their purpose. Ami is a creature that is purposefully obscure because, Angle says, if you create a certain animal or character, people have a preconceived notion of its potential.

He also chose not to have a well-known story. Instead, it will make a silent sound – two panels featured on the WSJ Future of Everything made a silent sound. “By design, it’s going to avoid giving real advice on things that maybe shouldn’t be giving real advice,” says Angle, nodding to the hot water LLM-powered chatbots continue to get into.

Primary communication will be through voice and body language, with the help of a camera-based system and a microphone array. With 23 degrees of freedom, the robot can move its head, neck, ears, eyes, and eyebrows, and walk at a slow human speed, but it cannot hold objects or climb stairs. Its four legs provide stability, which should help with concerns around the robot falling and damaging property or injuring people.

The goal of Cognitive Machines is to use AI to create a robot that can learn from its owners, remember patterns, and change their behavior, with the goal of encouraging long-term engagement, Angle says. They want to avoid living in the bedroom or falling into the trouble of many home robots (see Jibo, Aibo, Vector, Astroetc.). “If this is a toy, we’ve failed,” says Angle. “If this is a creature you want in your world, then we’ve removed it from the park.

The common features are managed by Nvidia’s Jetson Music chip. “The edge of AI is powered by a multi-sensory micro-system that is sufficient for human thinking, combining vision, hearing, language, and memory to create responsive behaviors in real-time,” says Angle. It doesn’t require an internet connection, although it can be connected, and it doesn’t download audio or video to the cloud, an idea designed to protect privacy and manage latency. However, it is still a device with cameras and microphones in your family environment.

Physical AI interacting with humans?

So, why would anyone want this robot in their home? Although Angle wants to know the truth, since the robot is still alive, he says that his AI-powered partner can help solve the problem. the growth of the problem of loneliness and provide another technical solution that makes us look at the screen.

“If your significant other wakes you up and leaves your room for a walk – that’s a real solution to isolation and loneliness,” she says. Most experiments with collaborative robots so far fail the “glass plate” test, Angle says. “If the sheet of glass between you and the device doesn’t change what’s going on, it should be a screen.” That’s why Ami was designed to interact with you, including shaking and hugging you. It also has a “super” functional coat, says Angle.

The video I saw of Ami showed a boy putting his tablet to sleep, a man deciding to stop scrolling and falling asleep after being attacked by a robot, an old woman walking Ami, and a young woman doing yoga next to it. The idea is that if it motivates you to do something other than sitting on the computer or being alone at home, you can be with other people.

While screen-free technology can be a boon to our visual-focused society, it’s a very complex form of social interaction. It’s going to take a lot more than a robotic pet to distract my teenage son from TikTok. And it’s still a robot, not a person you’re talking to. By providing a substitute for other forms of social interaction, it can act as a barrier to real interaction as screens do.

Assuming Angle and his team can pull off the robotic and human aspects, success will still depend on how consumers react to bringing a robot into their homes. How much is it? The first Roomba was a hit because it cost less than $200 and cleaned floors. “Finance with pets” is very difficult. Although Angle says the interest in Notable is “higher than what we saw with Roomba,” the lack of a clear goal sounds like a problem.

The main ways of using Angle mentioned are as a tool to help parents – a device that connects with your children when you can’t and is better than a tablet or a TV – and as a support for an elder, helping to eliminate loneliness and manage the behavior of drugs and their administration. The latter is similar to one of the most successful robots to date, Intuition Robotics’ ElliQ. (Angle is on the company’s board).

Many people look at this popular idea and say, “I want to have a real dog or cat.” As a devoted pet owner, I know that I would rather give my cat snuggles, walk my dog, or hang out with my chickens than have a machine. Angle points out that there are many reasons why people don’t own pets, sharing statistics on pet ownership. it drops to 9 percent after age 68when it can be difficult for a person to take care of an animal. For those who want an animal companion but for whatever reason can’t have one, Familiars can be an interesting option.

Angle brought the Celebrities down on stage at the WSJ conference, showing them walking around, walking, and interacting with people, making little noise. Sessions were partially controlled by drivers. Angle didn’t say to what extent, but he says Famous will be independent by next year. “This is a show, but it’s a show to a thing; we’re already in the industry,” he told the audience.

Regardless, it’s unclear how close it will come to Angle’s vision. These are huge promises in a field filled with failures and sky-high expectations, and all we’ve seen so far are tightly controlled demos. What is clear is that Angle believes that his team has already moved forward in their vision of creating artificial life. He said: “It’s not a toy, but it’s a real robot. “It’s enough for it that it’s cute, it’s wonderful to put to sleep and hug, and it can live with you. It is this organization. For another meaning of life, it is life.”