Roomba pioneer Colin Angle unveils plush AI pet robot “Familiar”

Angle, the former longtime CEO of iRobot who helped popularize the Roomba vacuum, is now betting that households will eventually adopt an “artificial pet” built for companionship rather than chores. On Monday, he unveiled a prototype called Familiar at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference in New York, describing it as a plush-like, four-legged machine intended to follow people around and adapt to daily life.

The prototype, presented as roughly the size of a bulldog, is built in a form that Angle said is “not a human, not a dog, not a cat,” and he said that choice was meant to steer away from expectations people bring to pet-like robots. In describing what that interaction could feel like, Angle said Familiar aims to be something people “want to hug” and “want to pet,” with the machine’s behavior designed to make users feel the way an animal’s mood can.

Familiar is also positioned as more than a passive gadget. Angle said the robot will have an AI system that can understand and learn from what people say to it, and he described an audio-input approach through “ears,” along with a capacity to gradually adapt based on the people around it. He said the robot will make emotive, animal-like sounds but will not talk in the way a person would.

Angle connected Familiar’s current capabilities to advances in artificial intelligence, saying he “couldn’t have done this six months ago.” He described the AI-driven approach as something that builds on generative AI advances made possible by chatbots such as ChatGPT, and he said Familiar’s ability to learn from people would not have been possible when he co-founded iRobot in 1990 or launched the first Roomba in 2002.

Angle also said the company has reason to believe the product could appeal to an older demographic. He said one target demographic is retired people who are past the peak age of pet ownership, and he linked that to the “fear and obligation of caring” for pets at older ages. In his account, the challenge is not that older adults stop enjoying pets, but that the responsibilities often make new pet adoption harder.

The Familiar concept draws on the idea of a companion creature with a long history in folklore, Angle said, citing examples including a witch’s cat and wizard’s owl, as well as animal companions in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.” He said the word “familiar” is “an archaic, ancient word,” and he said he was surprised he could trademark it.

To build out the project, Angle assembled a group of robotics advisers. The adviser roster included Marc Raibert, who founded Boston Dynamics and is associated with the four-legged Spot robot, and Cynthia Breazeal, who helped invent Kismet and later the tabletop speaker robot Jibo. Angle also said the team includes Maja Matarić, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California who co-founded the field of socially assistive robotics.

Matarić said that when she first saw Familiar’s prototype, she responded physically—she described getting down on the ground, hugging it and petting it, and then playing with it to see what it would do. She said research into human-robot interactions suggests a robot that is “cute, personalized and vulnerable” can be more appealing and lovable than alternatives, and she said Familiar could be particularly useful in nursing homes or for emotional support for mental health.

Angle’s background includes leading iRobot for a quarter century, during which he turned Roomba into a widely adopted home robot. He said he stepped down as CEO and chairman in 2024 after Amazon dropped its plan to buy the struggling Massachusetts company, and Familiar Machines was formed soon afterward in what he described as stealth mode until the Monday prototype reveal.

Angle said others have tried to build pet-like household robots as well, including Sony’s Aibo, which he described as a small robotic dog first introduced in the late 1990s and rebooted in 2018. But he said Familiar is designed to achieve a form of lifelike interaction that he argued “simply hasn’t existed before,” with a goal that the robot can follow people to places like the kitchen or out away from the couch.