Apple is rumoured to be considering venturing into the realm of AI-powered consumer robotics and this comes after news that it was cancelling its automotive project. 

The new consumer robot will act as a mobile screen capable of following a person around their home and locating sockets for power. Led by Apple’s VP of Hardware Engineering, Matt Costello, and Senior Director of Home Hardware Engineering, Brian Lynch, this project is still in its infancy and so it remains to be seen if this project will continue or face the same fate as the Apple car of years of development with no end-product.

Apple has always been a company that attempts to lead the consumer market with innovation and change, and while we are unsure if this project will come to fruition, this announcement marks a big and important step for the world of consumer robotics. The world of XR remained stagnant for years, however, once apple announced its own entry into this market rumours began flooding the internet of rival companies working on similar products. CES was then full of prototypes for augmented reality and mixed reality glasses proving that Apple can be pivotal in driving interest in new markets. 

If the same scenario plays out for consumer robots then we could be seeing houses full of smart mobile robots sooner rather than later. Alongside this, the rapid development of language models over the last few years makes it hard to believe that these home robots mixed with high-quality human like language models wont result in high quality mobile home helpers, think google home with limbs.

The team at DATAportl believes that the consumer robotics market sits at just over 50 million shipments a year with the potential to double over the next five years. Today most of these are such things as robotic toys and kits. However, with Apple’s entry acting as a catalyst for the development of mobile screens and other home-centred robots the market could realistically be much higher much sooner.

The original article is here.