Sony Aibo ERS-1000 · Unitree Go2

You are buying emotional attachment to a proprietary closed system. Sony controls the subscription and the service behind it, and nothing documented lets an owner keep full function locally if either ends. Sony has never closed an aibo cloud service; the precedent that does exist is the end of official repair support for the 1999 to 2006 line, in 2014.

Eight years of ownership stories prove Aibo’s reliability and engagement value. But the lack of practical task capability means the robot does not reduce household workload, it adds one more device to maintain and charge.

The developer price point and rough-terrain capability come at the cost of a learning curve measured in months, not hours; Go2 teaches robotics, it does not deliver a finished service.

The line splits into four machines: the 4D LiDAR is common to all of them, but obstacle avoidance and side-follow arrive on PRO and above and Jetson-class compute and foot force sensors only on EDU, so capability and price move together across a $1,600 to $4,500 spread.

Owners expecting autonomous home task capability

Aibo is a companion, not a task robot. It has no gripper, and it does not clean, carry or fetch. The one exception is aibo Patrol, a named Sony feature on the premium plan: Aibo walks a scheduled route through the home, looks for registered people and reports back through the app. Sony offers it as entertainment rather than as a security system, and it does not reduce any household workload.

Buyers uncomfortable with mandatory cloud subscriptions

Full behavioral learning and app interaction require $13/month cloud subscription. Offline mode is severely limited; feature gating is aggressive.

Owners with poor home network or privacy concerns

Aibo carries two cameras, the nose camera and a dedicated SLAM camera, maps the rooms it moves through, and enrolls up to 100 faces to tell people apart. It needs Wi-Fi for behavioral updates and interaction syncing, behavior data syncs to Sony's service, and no local-only operation mode is documented.

Users seeking out-of-the-box autonomous task completion

Go2 walks, avoids obstacles and follows a person in stock form, but it carries no task repertoire: there are no household or industrial jobs it performs on its own. Anything goal-directed is written against the SDK.

Buyers who assume a single Go2 specification

Go2 is a four-model line: AIR at $1,600, PRO at $2,800, X at $4,500, and EDU by sales contact. Compute, sensing and battery differ across it. Jetson-class onboard compute and foot force sensors are EDU features, and intelligent obstacle avoidance and ISS 2.0 side-follow are app features on PRO and above. A buyer specifying from a generic Go2 description can receive a machine without the feature they bought it for.

Users without programming or robotics background

Stock app control covers walking, obstacle avoidance and side-follow. Past that, behavior development means Python or C++ against the SDK; there is no no-code path to custom tasks.