Citing his own sources at Apple, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg says that the company has teams exploring the development of personal robotics, which could potentially become one of Apple’s next devices. Engineers on these teams have been researching a mobile robot that could follow users around the home and a desktop home device that uses robotics to move a display.
Although the efforts are still in their early stages and their release is still in question, Apple is eager to find new sources of revenue. In February, the company abandoned its electric car project, and mixed reality headsets will take years to generate large profits.
Thanks to robotics, Apple can gain a foothold in consumers’ homes and benefit from the progress of artificial intelligence. But it is not yet clear how exactly this will be realized. Although a robotic smart display is much further along than a mobile bot, it has been added and removed from the company’s roadmap over the years.
The robotics are being developed in Apple’s hardware engineering department and the artificial intelligence and machine learning group headed by John Giannandrea. Matt Costello and Brian Lynch, executives who focus on home products, lead hardware development. Apple has not yet made any commitments to any project, and the work is still in the early stages of research.
Before the electric car project was canceled, Apple told its top executives that the company’s future revolved around three areas: automotive, home, and mixed reality. But the car did not take offand the first mixed reality product, the Vision Pro headset, has already been released. Thus, the focus has shifted to other future opportunities.
The desktop robotics project first excited Apple’s top executives several years ago. The idea was that the display would take into account the movements of a person’s head during a FaceTime session. It would also have features to accurately fixate on one person in a crowd during a video call.
But the company was concerned about whether consumers would want to pay a lot of money for such a device. There were also technical problems related to balancing the weight of the robotic motor on a compact stand. According to people, the main obstacle was disagreement among Apple executives about whether to develop this product at all.
Near its campus in Cupertino, California, Apple has a secret facility that resembles the inside of a house — a place to test future devices and technologies for the home. Apple is exploring other ideas for this market, including a new home hub with an iPad-like display.