The man who put a Roomba in every home wants to replace your dog with a plush robot

Colin Angle, the robotics engineer who co-founded iRobot and spent 25 years turning the Roomba into the world’s most widely adopted home robot, has unveiled the prototype for his next act: a four-legged, plush-covered AI companion designed to follow you around your house, adapt to your daily habits, and make you feel something when it greets you at the door.

The robot is called the Familiar, and the company behind it is Familiar Machines & Magic, a startup that operated in stealth mode in Woburn, Massachusetts until Angle brought a working prototype to the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference in New York on 4 May. The device is roughly the size of a bulldog, with doe-like eyes, bear cub ears and paws, and touch-sensitive synthetic fur. It makes emotive, animal-like sounds but does not talk. It has audio input that allows it to listen and learn ...