Sony Aibo ERS-1000 · temi V3

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.

temi solves getting a screen and a small payload to a room and nothing past that. The navigation is genuinely hands-off, but the machine’s entire output is presence and transport: it picks nothing up, cleans nothing, and operates nothing, so the value rests on someone being on the other end of the screen or on the tray carrying something worth moving.

Navigation is confined to mapped indoor floors. Inside that map temi holds a published 5 cm accuracy, but there is no weather sealing, no stair capability, and no travel over anything rougher than a smooth floor, so a deployment covers one level of one building unless an elevator is part of the route.

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.

Work that requires handling objects

temi has no arm. It carries whatever a person places on its tray, up to a published 3 kg (6.6 lb), and cannot pick anything up, open anything, or set anything down. Delivery here means transport, not handover.

Outdoor or unstructured environments

No weather sealing; navigation assumes smooth indoor floors. Stairs, uneven terrain, and outdoor surfaces are impassable.

Spaces that have not been mapped

Autonomous travel is to destinations that were mapped and named first. Until someone walks temi through the space and saves those locations, a spoken command has nowhere to send it.