Two years ago, Colin Angle stepped down as CEO of iRobot, the company that he co-founded and the most successful home robot company the world has ever seen. Angle almost immediately founded a stealthy new \u201cphysical AI\u201d company called Familiar Machines & Magic (FM&M), which in short order managed to attract a combination of exceptionally talented robotics folks, including Morgan Pope from Disney Research, which got us very curious.<\/p>\n
Today, Familiar Machines & Magic is announcing its first robot, a \u201cphysically embodied AI system designed to perceive, adapt, and interact with people in ways that feel natural and consistent,\u201d the press release says. This robot is not a toy, and it\u2019s not specifically for kids. Rather, it\u2019s for adults to purchase for themselves and their families. It will get to know you, seek you out for attention, and actively help you to positively pursue an idealized routine in your life.<\/p>\n
![\"Gif](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/gif-shows-a-short-clip-of-a-cute-white-bear-like-robot-looking-around-a-doorframe-and-nodding.gif?id=66675850&width=980\")
Intended for adults, Familiar is pet-like in that it will seek you out for attention.<\/small>Familiar Machines & Magic<\/small><\/p>\n
Here are the (limited) technical details from the press release:<\/span><\/p>\n The first Familiar is a quadruped, specifically designed for human-robot interaction, with 23 degrees of freedom enabling both lifelike movement and expressive behaviors. The Familiar is covered with a custom touch-sensitive coat, a vision system, and a microphone array and audio system, to support rich interactions. Its onboard edge AI stack is powered by a custom small multimodal model optimized for social reasoning, combining vision, audio, language, and memory to create socially responsive behaviors in real time.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n FM&M CEO and co-founder Colin Angle tells us that this first prototype Familiar is designed to look like a sort of highly abstracted bear. It\u2019s very deliberately nothing like a dog or a cat, following the successful strategy of other social robots like Paro and Pleo\u2014if you can\u2019t connect the form factor to an animal that you have direct experience with, you won\u2019t bring expectations to your interactions with the robot.<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal is to position this as a robot familiar that lives with you and helps reinforce healthy routines,\u201d Angle says. He explains that thinking of a Familiar like a pet is a strong analogy, but pet-like also undersells what the robot can do. The Familiar behaves a little more like a service animal, in the narrow sense of being able to recognize activities and intervene to motivate you to do more or less of them, as the case may be. One easy example is screen time\u2014the Familiar can note how much time you spend on your phone, and if it\u2019s too much, it can actively try to engage you in other activities, including taking it for a walk outside. \u201cThe idea,\u201d says Angle, \u201cis that you can have a bit of technology in your home which is hyper-loyal to you, gets to know you, helps you figure out an idealized routine, and then plays a positive role.\u201d<\/p>\n Cramming this amount of intelligence into a robot that you can take for a walk outside (at regular human walking pace) is extremely ambitious. I asked FM&M\u2019s creative director Morgan Pope what made him feel like a robot like a Familiar was possible, with enough confidence that he was willing to leave Disney Research to join the startup. \u201c<\/strong>Two recent advancements made it feel tractable,\u201d Pope says. \u201cFirst, seeing Disney\u2019s bipedal robots walk flexibly over various terrain using reinforcement learning proved you can execute dynamic motion without needing perfect, zero-backlash actuators or crazy expensive hardware. And second, while I am often skeptical of generative AI hype, it is a perfect fit here because it excels at creating the plausible assumption of intelligence, which helps the character feel coherent and lifelike.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n As a social home robot, the Familiar will have quite a lot of work to do to single-pawedly reestablish a category that burned itself out between 2012 and 2019. A series of high profile and very well funded startups including Anki, Mayfield, and Jibo were not able to sustain social home robots as a business, primarily because of a struggle with longer-term engagement. It\u2019s not enough for a robot to be cute and charming in the short term; it has to continue enthralling its users or at least providing value after the initial novelty has worn off. In other words, a flashy demo is arguably counterproductive, which is a real problem, since robots excel at flashy demos.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about creating the right expectation and delivering on that expectation,\u201d says Angle. \u201cFamiliars live in your world and play by your rules, and if you don\u2019t find yourself hanging out with it, petting it, and engaging with it, then we haven\u2019t succeeded.\u201d<\/p>\n In what is very much not a coincidence, the term \u2018familiar\u2019 really is the best way of thinking about this robot\u2014a sort of vaguely magical non-human entity that has some amount of independence but whose existence and motivation are fundamentally tied to its human. \u201cThis isn\u2019t trying to be a replacement for a real friend,\u201d Angle explains. \u201cIt\u2019s artificial life that lives in your world, has its own personality and goals, and has a special link to its guardian where it wants attention and wants its guardian to be active.\u201d<\/p>\n This philosophy is a key differentiator for FM&M. A Familiar is more than a companion; it has long-term objectives that it\u2019s trying to fulfill to improve your life in a targeted way, says Angle. It\u2019ll attempt to connect with you socially to encourage you to spend time with it in service of those goals, but the goals are the end, er, goals, rather than just the social connection itself, which was the primary draw of the previous generation of social robots. \u201cWithin a few days of bringing your Familiar home,\u201d Angle tells us, \u201cit\u2019s figured out what its role in your life is. It\u2019s trying to reinforce a healthy routine, whether that be summoning people to dinner or cuddling up while you watch TV, or greeting you when you get home. And then the way you sustain that relationship is by having it evolve, with both characters playing an active role\u2014you\u2019re also helping it with the things required to keep a robot operating.\u201d<\/p>\n The temptation to leverage recent advances in AI to make a robot like a Familiar talk, especially in the context of regularly interacting with humans in pursuit of specific goals, must have been overwhelming. But to their credit, FM&M managed to resist. \u201cI don\u2019t believe that the technology exists today for AI to talk to humans in a safe, responsible fashion,\u201d Angle explains. Consequently, a Familiar does not currently speak, although it does make sounds, and has plenty of other ways of communicating. \u201cThrough careful design, you\u2019d be amazed what you can powerfully convey using a tail, wiggly ears, blinking eyes, and a brow that can be happy, sad, angry, or annoyed,\u201d Angle says. This will likely resonate strongly with dog owners, somewhat less strongly with cat owners, and only very slightly with reptile owners like myself.<\/p>\n Going the other direction is more complicated. Those same recent advances in AI mean that a Familiar can very likely understand everything you say and obey you perfectly, if it chose to. But doing so would break the illusion that the robot has its own desires and goals and personality, so FM&M had to be careful. \u201cThe way we\u2019ve trained it from an AI perspective is really cool,\u201d Angle explains. \u201cWe\u2019re using a tableau of speech and vision inputs presented to a small multimodal model trained on stories, and for a given tableau of inputs, it goes through a generative process to decide at a high level what it is going to do. That decision is handed to a behavior engine which builds out those behavior trees into goals and drives a reinforcement learning unified motion model. There is nothing fully deterministic about your Familiar\u2019s behavior; it truly tries to live its life with a variety of personality-driven emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n A Familiar is not a big robot, as robots go, but it\u2019s not exactly small, either. And as something with legs, there\u2019s always a concern about what happens if it falls over. \u201cIts low center of gravity helps immensely,\u201d says Pope. \u201cIf we pull power, it collapses downward safely rather than tipping over. Furthermore, it is wrapped in soft rubber, fur, and padding, so even if a leg impacts you, it won\u2019t have a lot of force behind it.\u201d Interestingly, FM&M is also leveraging the \u2018character experience\u2019 to mitigate risks to both robot and user. \u201cWe can use emotions to communicate hazards effectively,\u201d explains Pope. \u201cFor example, if someone carries it somewhere high or puts it near an open flame, the Familiar can act visibly scared to directly communicate that it doesn\u2019t like the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n Besides physical safety, social robots must also consider emotional safety. The better job you do emotionally connecting with people, the more responsibility you have to make sure that those connections are positive. \u201cWe take this very seriously,\u201d Pope tells us. \u201cWe must follow a \u2018do no harm\u2019 philosophy, ensuring we don\u2019t trigger unhealthy dependency or monopolize people\u2019s attention the way a phone does. We are designing carefully to ensure the overall impact remains positive and never crosses the line into harm.\u201d Additionally, the Familiar\u2019s AI runs onboard the robot, and the robot does not stream private data to the cloud. It will, in fact, run just fine if you disconnect it from the Internet entirely, although you\u2019ll lose access to any new features that come out.<\/p>\n Alongside the many engineering and HRI challenges that FM&M is having to manage is one other challenge that, in the near term, sounds rather dull but may be the most challenging: marketing. The company obviously has to promote this robot, but there\u2019s a real danger (which has had dire consequences for many robotics companies in the past) of selling an idea of what the robot could be<\/em><\/em> rather than the reality of what the robot actually is<\/em><\/em>.<\/p>\n From speaking with Pope, FM&M seems to understand that robots have always been the most successful when the experience or task is incidental to the robot itself\u2014in other words, what\u2019s most compelling is what the robot will do<\/em><\/em>, rather than the fact that it\u2019s a robot. \u201cThe best way to understand a Familiar is that we are not building a robot; we are building a relationship,\u201d Pope explains.<\/p>\n Whether in the context of locomotion or relationships, we can be absolutely certain that a robot of this level of sophistication is not going to do what it\u2019s supposed to every single time. Fortunately, the folks at FM&M have been building robots for long enough that they\u2019re prepared for this. \u201cWe\u2019ve explicitly tried to design it to motivate forgiveness,\u201d Angle tells us. \u201cThis is not a precise robotic entity in its motion or dexterity. It\u2019s supposed to be imperfect, but it\u2019s going to get some of it right. By actively working to manage expectations to a place we can achieve, we want consumers to appreciate what it can do.\u201d<\/p>\n What customers expect, what they appreciate, and how much forgiveness they\u2019re willing to bestow is for better or worse highly dependent on how much a Familiar will cost. \u201cFor the cost of ownership of something like a pet, you\u2019re getting something that can help you live a healthier life, feel attended to, and provide social benefit,\u201d Angle says. This could mean many things, depending on the pet, but one source puts the low end of the monthly cost for a cat at around $65 per month, with a dog somewhat more expensive at closer to $100 per month. FM&M\u2019s press release stresses that today\u2019s announcement \u2018is not a commercial product launch,\u2019 and specific pricing and a timeline will come later.<\/p>\n While it\u2019s much too early for us to be speculating about what the future might hold for FM&M\u2019s robots, Angle is of course already thinking about other places where Familiars might be at home. \u201cThis first robot is meant to be a platform with general appeal and an opportunity to specialize into things like elder care and parental support,\u201d Angle says. \u201cFrom the ground up we are designing machines focused on human connection, and the underlying technology can further generalize into other form factors.\u201d<\/p>\n This will require the Familiar to find success, and it\u2019s important to reiterate how much of a challenge this will be. A legged robot, designed for human interaction, in the home\u2014everything about what FM&M is doing is hard. Because of his experience launching and leading iRobot, Angle is one of the very few people with the experience to really understand this, but his excitement and optimism about the Familiar is undiminished. \u201cDo we know exactly how it\u2019s going to land? I don\u2019t,\u201d says Angle. \u201cBut do I think it\u2019s going to work? Absolutely. We\u2019re going to find out, with a mission and goals that are noble at heart.\u201d<\/p>\n From Your Site Articles<\/p>\n Related Articles Around the Web<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two years ago, Colin Angle stepped down as CEO of iRobot, the company that he co-founded and the most successful home robot company the world […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/gif-shows-a-short-clip-of-a-cute-white-bear-like-robot-looking-around-a-doorframe-and-nodding.gif?id=66675850&width=980","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1563,1565,1561,1564,1562],"class_list":["post-1743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rj","tag-colin-angle","tag-home-robots","tag-irobot","tag-robot-animals","tag-social-robots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjbarrett.redirectme.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What Does it Do?<\/h3>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-man-reaches-out-to-touch-a-white-robot-while-lying-on-the-couch-looking-at-his-phone.jpg?id=66675852&width=980\")
Spending too much time on your phone? Familiar can help with that.<\/small>Familiar Machines & Magic<\/small><\/p>\nThe Challenge of Social Home Robots<\/h3>\n
![\"Animated](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/animated-gif-shows-a-woman-doing-yoga-while-a-soft-looking-animal-like-white-robot-imitates-her-pose.gif?id=66675858&width=980\")
Part of the value of Familiar is that it will help you establish healthy routines.<\/small>Familiar Machines & Magic<\/small><\/p>\nCreating Long-Term Value<\/h3>\n
Human-Familiar Interaction<\/h3>\n
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Familiar is capable enough to keep up with you on walks outdoors.<\/small>Familiar Machines & Magic<\/small><\/p>\nSafety at Home<\/h3>\n
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While not a toy or specifically intended for children, Familiar can provide gentle, warm attention to your family.<\/small>Familiar Machines & Magic<\/small><\/p>\nManaging Expectations<\/h3>\n
A Future Platform<\/h3>\n