Are companion robots autonomous? What they do without being asked
LOVOT meets people at the door and ElliQ opens the morning with the weather, though nobody asked either one. Neither has a chore to finish.
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ElliQ lives beside a favorite chair or on a bedside table, in whatever room its owner spends most of the day. From there, it speaks first. It can “check in and suggest activities when you are available, instead of waiting for a command.”
An ElliQ day opens with the weather forecast and the owner’s reminders, along with prompts to take medication and stay active. New York State’s Office for the Aging, which is making about 900 of the devices available to older residents, sums up the design: “ElliQ is proactive and personalized: it initiates conversation, suggests activities, and remembers what users tell it.”
So is a machine that speaks first autonomous? A companion robot has no floor to finish and no lawn to cut. What it starts by itself is behavior: a conversation, a search for someone to greet, a trip back to the charger. If you’re buying one for a parent who lives alone, those unasked moments are what you’re paying for.
Robots that come looking for people
Sony’s aibo robot dog “recognizes spaces as it walks around the room, detecting obstacles to avoid and even figuring out the shortest distances to different locations.” It gets to know everyone in the house and comes when you call its name. When it’s tired, it walks back to its charging station without being told.
GROOVE X built LOVOT for much the same life, on wheels that tuck away when someone picks it up. It comes when called by name, follows people from room to room, greets them at the door and lifts its arms when it wants to be held. It also heads back to its charging Nest by itself.
LOVOT can keep this up for as long as 16 hours a day, and not all of it looks helpful. A December 2018 report described a robot that “begs for attention and gets in the way of those it lives with, and at times will shy away from people it does not know.”
We want people to see that though something may seem useless at first glance, it serves a meaningful function in other ways.
Kaname Hayashi, president of GROOVE X, in the same 2018 report
Loona and Vector are built along the same lines. Loona “detects bodies and obstacles, maintains safe distances, plans efficient adaptive routes,” recognizes each member of the family and docks itself to recharge. Vector is “made to explore and react,” picking out people and objects as it steers around obstacles.
A robot that drives itself to the video call
The temi robot uses lidar and depth sensors to map a home or office, then saves preset locations and drives to them. It will “recognise and follow when requested,” steering around toys and pets and keeping clear of staircases. When its battery needs charging, it drives back to its dock. So who decides where it goes?
Every trip the product page describes starts with a person. Someone away from home connects through the temi app on a phone, and the robot becomes their way “to roam around and spend time with your loved ones or to check and make sure that things are safe at home.”
The robot handles the route, around the toys and short of the stairs. If it meets something it can’t get around, “it simply stops.” What happens when it arrives, a conversation on its screen, is between two people.
How much of it is the robot’s own
LOVOT recognizes faces on the robot, and its camera images are never uploaded to the cloud. Sony’s aibo works the other way. An AI Cloud Plan keeps the dog’s memories of what it has seen and heard on a dedicated server, where its personality develops too.
In Japan, an owner who cancels Sony’s plan has a dog that stops learning people, objects and places. The memories Sony held in the cloud are deleted, and the app can no longer reach the dog. Walking isn’t on the list of what ends.
Figure
Where a companion robot’s memories are kept
- Stays putMemory and compute are hardware you own, so the same three streams never leave the building.
- Things it has seenCrosses the wall. Anything over this line is held on a vendor server, under their retention policy rather than yours, for as long as they choose.
- Things it has heardCrosses the same wall to the same server.
- Its personalityCrosses the same wall to the same server.
For some robots, the server holds more than memories. When Embodied announced in December 2024 that it was closing, its Moxie robots for children depended on the company’s cloud servers and were set to shut off with it. Its chief executive then announced a plan to release a server program owners could run on a computer at home.
Vector’s owners saw an earlier version of this. By the time Digital Dream Labs bought the assets of Anki, Vector’s first maker, in December 2019, some of the robot’s non-critical cloud features had been switched off. Today the company sells a monthly subscription, and “voice command access” heads the list of what it includes.
Still, the Autonomy Ladder grades a robot on what it is documented to do by itself, and its upper rungs ask for a routine job finished with nobody standing by. ElliQ, which starts conversations from wherever it is set, sits at Level I. Sony’s aibo sits at Level II, LOVOT at Level II and temi at Level II; all three move themselves around a home.
These robots do start things unasked, and what they start is company. ElliQ opens the conversation, LOVOT greets people at the door, and aibo, LOVOT and Loona take themselves back to charge. The temi robot drives itself, but except for trips to its dock, a person chooses where it goes. None of them is sold to finish a job.
Back beside the favorite chair, ElliQ will open tomorrow with the weather and the reminders, and nobody will have asked it to. The job it leaves to its owner is the urgent one. “ElliQ is not an emergency device,” Intuition Robotics says. In an emergency, the person in that chair is told to call 911.
