The Hengbot Sirius robot dog looked at me and I reflexively stroked its face and caressed her eyes as a menu appeared on the screen. In short, that’s the problem with the Hengbot Sirius: it’s an artificially intelligent robot dog that has consumer aspirations, but is actually built almost exclusively for nerds and nerds.
Sirius looks more like an x-ray of a dog than a real hunting dog. He can run, bark, growl, dance, stand on his head and fall as if someone poured brandy into his water bowl.
He bites worse than his bark
After seeing the pictures, I wasn’t too disappointed with the look, but there were other, even less positive surprises.
The price is one. It currently costs around $700 on Kickstarter, but retail will be closer to $1,000.
He is small, more chihuahua than beagle.
It has 14 motors (or “actuators” in robot jargon), but most of them are for the connection between the legs and the body: (three each) and the head (two). The legs, similar to those on the Boston Dynamics Spot (both finished with rubber feet), are not motorized and rely on springs to stay taut. They may be responsible for the incredible frequency of Sirius falls.
Another plus was the battery life of 45 minutes including charging time. Real dogs survive easily.
There is also no automatic loading. When you get tired, pick up the surprisingly heavy robot dog and plug in a USB-C cable.
Touch sensors are missing. Sirius has one on his head or on the screen surface. And that’s it. You can caress his hard belly, but Sirius will never know. The face responds to caresses and touches, but it can also be disturbing when the beautiful eyes are exchanged for the menu.
I mention all this because Hengbot Sirius enters the robot dog market as if it were new and untouched by previous innovations. Even the cheapest robot dogs I know have at least two touch sensors. The more expensive Sony Aibo is almost fully equipped with it.
I turned my gaze to management and wondered why they didn’t at least try to make it sweet and cuddly. They’ve thought about it, but apparently have no direct plans. I can’t imagine this being a viable robot companion for the dust-covered 1X Neo Beta.
On the plus side, it’s an AI-powered bot that can accept voice commands and use Amazon LLM in the background to understand questions and requests.
This dog could be smarter
It also has cameras and can start to recognize the owner and use artificial intelligence and interactions to create a unique personality that you can upload to the cloud with Hengbot when you need to upload it to a new Sirius.
In short, Sirius will also release open source code and a live developer community where routines can be uploaded and downloaded.
We saw that it ran preset routines and could even be controlled remotely via a PC. He may be cute and even adorable, but none of that impressed me.
I took it and turned the robot dog over in my hands. It doesn’t seem particularly child-friendly and, according to the company, has no IP rating. So if your child tries to wash him or even give him water, Sirius may not survive.
I was hoping that as a modern robot dog with cloud connectivity and Amazon LLM, it would be able to connect to at least one smart home platform, but Hengbot said that there is currently no support for Google Home, Amazon or Apple Home.
That’s a shame, because robot dogs like these, which can hop around the house with a camera attached to their nose, can be pretty good home security devices.
Ultimately, Hengbot Sirius is an expressive AI robot experience. It will have an audience of developers, but it is far from puppy-friendly. Maybe version 2.