Colin Angle, co-founder of iRobot and developer of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, has revealed his next venture. It is a dog-sized robot companion built around generative AI and designed to form lasting emotional connections with the people it lives with.
Developed under Ingres’ new company, Familia Machines and Magic, the robot takes the form of an intentionally indiscernible quadrupedal creature, drawing visual references from bears, barn owls, and golden retrievers without limiting itself to a single animal, a design choice intended to prevent owners from arriving with fixed expectations about what the device can and cannot do.
The robot, internally codenamed “Ami” and officially called “Familia,” has 23 degrees of freedom across its head, neck, ears, eyes, and eyebrows, and generates facial expressions and body language as its primary communication channel, rather than speech. The team chose no audio output to avoid the factual accuracy pitfalls that complicate other consumer AI products.
Nvidia Jetson Orin chips power onboard processing to run custom multimodal models that combine vision, voice, language, and memory without the need for cloud connectivity. This is a deliberate decision considering both privacy and response latency for a device intended to operate continuously within a family’s living space.
Mr. Angle has identified families with young children, elderly users living alone, and people experiencing chronic loneliness as the main target groups for Familia, and the robot is designed to encourage physical activity, guide owners to healthier habits, and provide tactile interaction through a touch-sensitive exterior coat rather than screen-based controls.
The company has assembled an engineering team from Boston Dynamics, Bose, Disney, MIT, and Sonos, and Angle described the project as the realization of his original ambitions when he founded iRobot under the name Artificial Creatures Inc. in 1990, before the technology existed to make the concept a reality.
No firm release date has been confirmed beyond the target of sometime next year, and the price is only described as being comparable to the ongoing cost of owning a pet, rather than a fixed retail price.
