Robot familiars, is AI or UI the next frontier?
Hello Robot says the next household robot is NOT a humanoid
With Familiar Machines & Magic Colin Angle, Chris Jones and Ira Renfrew want to bring a new type of robot companion and assistant into our lives. These ‘familiars’ are not robot pets, nor are they intended only for children or the elderly. FM&M want to create a relationship with robots that would work for all ages. According to the press release, they are a “physically embodied AI system designed to perceive, adapt, and interact with people in ways that feel natural and consistent”.
After nearly three decades leading iRobot, the world’s most successful consumer robotics company, Angle has experience on his side. He also has a dream team, including Co-founders and iRobot colleagues, Chris Jones and Ira Renfrew, and other experts like Morgan Pope, coming from places like Disney Imagineering and Amazon. The first Familiar design is an abstract dog/bear/owl, following the good robot design principles that worked so well for real and imaginary robots like Paro, Pleo, BayMax and R2D2.
Don’t over promise by looking too similar to something else, let our expectations be lower and then our interactions are more delightful. Familiars are a great example of how AI in hand with great UI is the next frontier for robotics.
Another great example of underpromising and overdelivering are Hello Robot’s household robots. Hello Robot’s Stretch is an open-source mobile manipulator that looks less like a humanoid and more like the lovechild of an accessibility tool and a robot vacuum cleaner. It includes some award winning mechanical innovation. Co-founders Aaron Edsinger and Charlie Kemp extensively researched the field and worked with end users to design the most affordable and useful household help robots available.
Henry and Jane Evans, disability advocates through Robots for Humanity are long term design partners and advisors to Hello Robot, articulate the need for good UI (over AI) in The Caregiver Principle.
NO MATTER HOW MUCH ASSISTANCE A DEVICE PROVIDES TO A [ADULT] PATIENT, IT WILL NOT BE USED REGULARLY UNLESS IT ALSO TAKES NO TIME TO EITHER SET UP OR USE BY THE CAREGIVER, AND UNLESS IT MAKES THE CAREGIVER’S LIFE, NET NET, A LOT EASIER.
As another counterpoint to the argument that AI is the path forward for robotics, there’s an argument that AI, low cost hardware and the Robots-As-A-Service business model is putting system integrators out of business. And deployments of robots still routinely depend on the middle layer of systems integration. Ultimately though, there is no threat to systems integrators unless the UI is impeccable. And even the best UI can’t replace the time and human to human contact that it takes to build a relationship of trust.
Universal Robots threatened to upset the same distribution apple cart a decade ago, with it’s easy to use ‘out of the box’ robot arms. Universal Robots also launched at the right time to leverage the rise of youtube, and a new generation of robot influencers, easy to share robot installation videos and ideas. But ultimately this only expanded the need for integrators as demand for robots crept into more and more new industries or businesses.
The Fortune 500 can afford to support new technology deployments but most everyone else can’t and that’s the majority of the world’s businesses. All of them want a foolproof robotics deployment. AI is enabling great strides in robot adaptation and flexibility. Good UI is empowering anyone to operate robots without extensive training. And lowering hardware costs is creating greater availability. However, this also leads to a lot of noise, a lot of mistakes and skepticism about the usefulness of robots.
Sean Dotson raises good points about the changes coming for traditional systems integrators in The Integrator Squeeze, but I’m with Robert Little on this one. We aren’t replacing the critical aspect of human trust and that means we still need a middle layer of robotics integration.
Europe continues to move ahead with funding for industrial human-robot collaboration UI research, as seen here with PAL Robotics and the JARVIS Project, funded under the Horizon Europe program. In the U.S. meanwhile an alliance of robotics OEMs, manufacturers and integrators has formed Robots for America, in order to campaign for a more cohesive approach to advancing industry with robots, and advancing and the infrastructure for robots.
References:
Roomba pioneer aims to crack the household market again with an AI-powered pet robot https://apnews.com/article/ai-pet-robot-familiar-machines-irobot-roomba-da873ddff1ebcc95f793852b8e53d2d2
iRobot Founder Wants to put a Robotic Familiar Into Your Home https://spectrum.ieee.org/familiar-machines-and-magic
The creator of Roomba is back with a furry robot companion https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/922947/roomba-creator-new-robot-familiar-machines-magic-ai-launch
The Roomba Guy’s Second Act: A Robot You’ll Want to Snuggle https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/familiar-machines-and-magic-robot-c8711e45
A Robot You Can Snuggle Debuts at WSJ’s Flagship Event https://www.wsj.com/tech/a-robot-you-can-snuggle-debuts-at-wsjs-flagship-event-1e7127cb
What if the future of home robotics doesn’t look humanoid at all? Aaron Edsinger on What’s Your Problem podcast https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hello-robot-inc_robotics-ai-innovation-activity-7455690855304224768-v1q_
The Integrator Squeeze Is Already Here, and Most Owners Are Pretending Otherwise
Robert Little on the pros and cons of Sean Dotson’s integrator squeeze article https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-little-707791a_robotics-systemintegrator-manufacturing-activity-7458493447239475200-vshZ
PAL Robotics cone handling demonstration https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pal-robotics_jarvis-jarvisproject-horizoneurope-activity-7455602955556237312-0lJr
Advancing human-robot collaboration
in a user-centric manner https://jarvis-project.eu/The U.S. doesn’t have a robotics strategy problem. It has a robotics deployment problem. Robots for America https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robots-for-america_the-us-doesnt-have-a-robotics-strategy-activity-7450957659366666241-08To
Want to host an event or reach the robotics community?
Many companies are reaching out about hosting events, outreach or hiring and we have a great community network, of people looking for work, of investors interested in deal flow and of technologists interested in learning about the latest advances.
Would you be interested in hosting the next Bots, Bevs and Devs? Or something customized specifically for your goals? Reach out here!
A timely event from BayCHI (not HRI but close)
Fast AI vs Good AI: Reflections from the trenches of AI adoption on a Software Development team with Google’s Jude Yew
AI-powered software development is generating a lot of claims– about productivity gains, about how engineers work, about what’s changing and what isn’t. But how much of it holds up from the perspective of someone in the trenches of doing this work?
This talk draws on my experience as a UX Researcher embedded in a software development team that is in the midst of employing agentic modes of working across our organizagtion. I’ll take some of the most talked-about ideas in AI-enabled development– cognitive surrender, productivity measurement, the pace of model change— and run them against what I’ve actually observed and experienced. Some of the discourse holds up. Some of it doesn’t. And some of the most important things happening aren’t being talked about much at all.
The goal isn’t to debunk the hype or add to it. It’s to offer a more grounded account of what this transition actually looks like from the trenches.
Bio:
Jude is a user experience researcher working on developing efficient and delightful Developer Experiences. His work focuses on using mixed-method approaches towards studying developer workflows and tools in order to identify pain points and challenges. Jude manages a team of UX Researchers and Software Engineers that identifies and addresses software developer experience across a variety of surfaces such as, APIs, SDKs and Documentation.
He was previously a faculty member at the National University of Singapore studying the interaction of humans in online social spaces with a goal to harness collective effort and intelligence for greater social good.
Talking Robotics is excited to host Jiafei Duan from the University of Washington / National University of Singapore for episode #89!
Title: Beyond Imitation: VLMs as Rewards, Steerers, and Reasoners for Robot Learning
Date: 13 May, 2026 (Wednesday) - 09:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST | 18:00 CEST
Free & Mandatory Zoom Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/fQYEmqUNSJate4qT9h1Ueg#/registration
Talk Details: https://talking-robotics.github.io/talks/jiafei_duan/
Abstract:
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made rapid progress in pretraining, but turning them into reliable, generalizable robots still runs into familiar walls — sparse rewards, brittle out-of-distribution behavior, and policies that act without explainable plans. This talk argues the missing piece isn’t more action data; it’s putting pretrained vision-language knowledge to work in three complementary roles inside the action-generation loop.
Jiafei will walk through three recent works, each occupying one role. TOPReward treats VLMs as evaluators, extracting dense, zero-shot reward signals directly from the token logits of off-the-shelf video VLMs — no calibration, no annotation, and strong correlation with true task progress across 130+ real-world manipulation tasks. Vision-Language Steering (VLS) turns VLMs into correctors, synthesizing differentiable rewards at inference time to steer frozen diffusion and flow-matching policies toward trajectories that satisfy out-of-distribution scenes and instructions — without any fine-tuning. MolmoAct2 then bakes the VLM in as the reasoner, predicting adaptive depth-aware perception tokens yielding behavior that is both more performant and more steerable than monolithic VLAs.
Together, these works sketch a path beyond imitation: a stack in which pretrained VLMs reward, steer, and reason about action — making robot learning more sample-efficient, more robust to distribution shift, and more transparent.
Speaker Bio:
Jiafei Duan is an incoming Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, School of Computing. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he was advised by Professors Dieter Fox and Ranjay Krishna. His work lies at the intersection of robotics and computer vision, with a focus on robotics foundation models — particularly scalable data collection and generation, grounding vision–language models in robotic reasoning, and improving robust generalization in robot learning. His research has been featured in MIT Technology Review, GeekWire, VentureBeat, and Business Wire, and has appeared at top AI and robotics venues including ICLR, ICML, RSS, CoRL, ECCV, IJCAI, CoLM, and EMNLP. Among his honors are the Best Paper Award at Ubiquitous Robots 2023, the Best Paper Award at the CoRL RememberRL Workshop 2025, and a Spotlight Award at ICLR 2024.
We look forward to seeing you at Jiafei’s talk!
Best,
Talking Robotics
IEEE Humanoids 2026 Call for Workshops
CALL FOR WORKSHOPS & TUTORIALS:
What: 2026 IEEE RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots
When: December 6-9, 2026
Where: Santa Clara, California, USA
Web:
https://2026.ieee-humanoids.org
—
IMPORTANT DATES:
Aug. 3, 2026: Workshop/tutorial proposal deadline
Sep. 28, 2026: Notification of workshop/tutorial acceptance/rejection
Dec. 7, 2026: Humanoids 2026 workshops/tutorials
—
Dear colleagues,
We are very pleased to invite you to contribute proposals for half-day or full-day workshops/tutorials to the 2026 IEEE RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots to be held December 6-9, 2026 in Santa Clara, California, USA.
WORKSHOPS & TUTORIALS: The workshop and tutorial sessions are aimed at exploring the frontiers of recent or emerging topics related to humanoid robotics, with relevant topics detailed below. We encourage workshops and tutorials that will promote exchanges and interactions between presenters and participants. Proposals with a diverse set of speakers, including a balance between (i) junior and senior presenters, (ii) genders, (iii) geographic location, (iv) race and ethnicity, and (v) industry and academia, will be preferred.
OVERVIEW: Humanoids 2026 aims at bringing together top researchers from humanoid robotics and related disciplines with leading companies in the field. In light of a year of rapidly evolving humanoid technologies with several new platforms coming onto the market and bringing us closer to a wider real-world deployment. Our community envisions innovative areas in humanoid robotics that lie at the intersection of general-purpose physical, cognitive, and motor capabilities, while also considering the scientific understanding of interactions with humanoid and anthropomorphic systems.
SCHEDULE: The conference will be organized as a 4-day event opening on December 6th (Sunday) with public panels, seminars, and hackathons, followed by workshops and tutorials on December 7th (Monday), followed by 2 days December 8th-9th (Tuesday-Wednesday) for the main conference with plenaries, keynotes, oral and interactive sessions, and industry events. A centrally located exhibition will feature the latest humanoid technology from both industry and academia.
TOPICS: We invite workshops/tutorials in all areas related to humanoid robotics, including, but not limited to:
Human biomechanics and motor control, human body and behavior modeling
Bionic / human-inspired design principles for humanoids
Human-inspired robot control
Whole-body dynamics and control
Optimization, optimal control, and model predictive control methods
Learning methods for humanoid robots
Robot modeling for locomotion and/or manipulation
Exoskeleton / wearable robot design and control
Prosthesis design and control
Physical and social human-humanoid interaction
Dynamic legged locomotion (bipeds, quadrupeds, etc.)
Loco-manipulation, legged manipulation
Dual arm dexterous manipulation
Design, control, and application of multi-finger hands
Stability and robustness of humanoid and legged robots and humans
Simulation and physics-based animations from computer graphics
Humanoid heads and faces, geminoids
Novel materials, mechanisms, and actuators for humanoids
Perception for humanoids
Human-centered robotic studies and applications
Neuro-robotics and brain-robot interfaces for humanoids and humans
Real-world applications for humanoid robots (industry, healthcare, home, space, disaster response)
Benchmarks, performance indicators for humanoid robots
Ethical and social challenges of humanoid robot deployment
Long-term deployment of humanoid, bipedal, or dual arm manipulation robots
EXHIBITION: Industry leaders are eager to see your organization’s latest developments, connect, learn, and collaborate. Don’t miss this opportunity to make a strong, in-person impression. For more information contact Hall-Erickson, Inc: humanoids@heiexpo.com
MORE INFORMATION: For more information, please visit the conference contributions webpage (https://2026.ieee-humanoids.org/call-for-workshops-and-tutorials) or contact the Workshop Chairs: Enrico Mingo Hoffman, Yan Gu, and Rafael Cisneros-Limón (humanoids2026-wt@ieee.org).
We look forward to your contributions to Humanoids 2026!
—
The Humanoids 2026 General Chairs:
Andra Keay (Silicon Valley Robotics)
Ross Mead (Semio)
Silicon Valley Robotics Investor/Startup Database
Are you a startup fundraising atm? Fill out our “For Investors Eyes Only” sheet.
These investors write checks anywhere from angel and seed stage to $5-50 million.
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If you’re an accredited investor and haven’t already signed up for the spreadsheet - Sign up here for great robotics deal flow!
More Robotics News
A hacker ran me over with a robot lawn mower - The Verge
Hackable Robot Lawn Mower Unlocks a New Nightmare - Wired
How to Build a Trustworthy Robot - Nautilus
How a Robot (Sort of) Made Me Lunch - Time
Hugging Face launches robot app store - Axios
Waymo’s $16B round drives private equity investment surge in autonomous vehicles - S&P Global
Pentagon seeks smarter, self-organizing drones as autonomous-warfare budget is poised to skyrocket - Defense One
Coastguard to deploy autonomous saildrones on Great Lakes - Military Times
Wayve CEO: AI is Reshaping Autonomous Driving - Startup Hub AI
Rocket Lab announces large launch contract and plans to acquire space robotics company - Space News
Humble Hauler autonomous trailer takes the truck out of trucking - Electrek
The math is improving for autonomous trucks - Axios
Berkshire-owned distribution giant to deploy driverless big rigs across U.S. Sun Belt - CNBC
Podcast: Autonomous labs redefine the role of biopharma researchers - Pharmaceutical Technology
Tutor Intelligence launches ‘largest robot data factory in the US’ - Manufacturing Dive
Humanoid Robots Are the Next Phase of the AI Hype Cycle - Bloomberg
Robot passenger ‘traveling for work’ causes Southwest flight delay after arriving to gate late - AOL
DEEP Robotics Introducees Bionic Robot Horse for Industrial Applications - ThomasNet
Robotics Events
Peak SF is back.
On May 14, Ultimate Bots launches Season 1 at Temple SF - powered by @Nebiusai, the ultimate physical AI cloud. Humanoid robot fights, Robot dance offs, Live performances
Tickets are extremely limited. https://luma.com/sg126t3h
Open House / Open Build / Open Repair Projects Workshop
Our monthly Circuit Launch Oakland “Open House” evening for everyone, fun for the whole family! Join us every third Friday evening of the month:
○ Robot, AI and Electronics Projects: Start a project, continue a project or discover one here: we provide the space, tools and peer learning – you bring your project and enthusiasm!
○ Repair Projects: Fixit Clinic’s monthly residency at Circuit Launch: bring your repair projects – electronic gadgets, appliances, computers, toys, etc.– for consultation, assessment, disassembly, and possible repair. We’ll provide workspace, specialty tools, and guidance to help you disassemble and troubleshoot your item. First-time repairers and “Fixing Families” are heartily invited. Learn more at
○ Tech Topic Discussions and Practice: join the AI thought leadership practise group for lively conversation: Come share your knowledge -- or your lack thereof: all experience levels welcome.
It’s definitely worth a visit if you’ve never been here: tour Circuit Launch and see all the exciting companies and projects in progress.
– U18s heartily welcome with a participating adult.
– Equipment use outside of the soldering and debugging gear requires certification.
Looking forward to seeing you this third Friday!
More Robotics Events:
Robotics Invest - Boston - May 26-27
ICRA 2026 - Vienna, Austria - Jun 01 - Jun 05
IEEE Hard Tech Venture Summit - Boston - June 10 - June 11
Automate - Chicago - June 22 - Jun 25
Deep Tech Week - SF - Jun 21 - Jun 25
Robot Fringe Festival - London - Jul 2
Robotics: Science and Systems - Sydney, Australia - Jul 13 - Jul 16
Open Sauce - San Francisco - Jul 17 - Jul 19
Actuate - San Francisco - Aug 18 - Aug 19
ROSCon Global - Toronto - Sep 22 - Sep 24
IROS 2026 - Pittsburgh - Sep 27 - Oct 1
IEEE Humanoids 2026 - Silicon Valley - Dec 6-9
The annual IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots is the internationally recognized prime event of the humanoid robotics community. The conference is sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and coordinated by the Technical Committee on Humanoids.
Mountain View Technology Showcase 2026
Call for Makers Application
July 30, 2026
11:00AM - 3PM
Mountain View Civic Center Plaza -- 500 Castro Street
The Technology Showcase is a unique opportunity for local Mountain View tech-oriented companies and makers to showcase their ideas and products to a wide audience. Whether you are an entrepreneur, startup, or established business, this wildly popular annual event attracts hundreds of potential customers, influencers, and investors. For no cost to you, you can have a booth at the event and showcase your technology.
The one day outdoor event takes place in Downtown Mountain View and is free to the public.
- Exhibitor Booth Includes: 10x10 space, 6ft table, white table cover, 2 chairs
Application deadline is June 22, 2026
Questions please reach out to marisol@chambermv.org
Send me your 2026 progress, plans or posts for potential inclusion in Robots&Startups. Or join the organizing team at Silicon Valley Robotics - bots&beer@svrobo.org
