Colin Angle, the robotics entrepreneur who turned the Roomba into a household name, is betting that the next mass-market home robot will be something you want to hug. On Monday, he pulled his startup out of stealth mode, bringing a prototype of the Familiar—a dog-sized, four-legged machine with doe-like eyes and touch-sensitive fake fur—to The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference in New York.
“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 said in an interview with The Associated Press. He leads Familiar Machines & Magic, the Woburn, Massachusetts company he founded after a tumultuous exit from iRobot, the firm he co-founded in 1990.
Angle stepped down as iRobot’s CEO and chairman in 2024 after Amazon abandoned its plan to acquire the struggling vacuum maker, which faced intense competition from Chinese rivals. The Familiar, he said, represents a category of companion robot that “simply hasn’t existed before.” Unlike Sony’s Aibo, a plastic robotic dog that first appeared in the late 1990s and was rebooted in 2018, the Familiar is meant to be physically interacted with—petted, hugged, and nudged off the couch for a walk.
The robot doesn’t speak. Instead, it makes animal-like sounds and uses audio inputs, paired with generative AI systems akin to those behind ChatGPT, to interpret what people say and gradually shape its behavior. “I couldn’t have done this six months ago,” Angle said, pointing to the rapid pace of AI progress.
A key target demographic is older adults beyond the prime years 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.
The project has drawn high-profile robotics advisers, including Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, and Cynthia Breazeal, creator of the expressive robot head Kismet. Maja Matarić, a University of Southern California computer science professor who co-founded the field of socially assistive robotics 25 years ago, described her first encounter with the prototype: “I 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.”
Matarić said research shows that “cute, personalized and vulnerable” robots are vastly more appealing than uncanny alternatives. She sees potential use in nursing homes and mental-health contexts. “Before generative AI, robots could not readily understand what people were saying,” she added.
Angle said the idea of a familiar—a companion animal with deep roots in folklore—came to him partly by surprise. “It’s an archaic, ancient word,” he said, and one he found he could trademark. He has not announced a release date or price.