Ever Trend Zone LG is doubling down on its commitment to robotics and this time bringing with it its vision of the smart home.
The Korean giant has announced that it has acquired a majority stake in Bear Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup best known for its AI-powered service robots (pictured above) that have already made their way into restaurants and hotels. in the USA, South Korea. and Japan.
In fact, LG acquired a 21% stake in Bear Robotics last year, but has now added another 30%, giving it majority control.
This isn’t LG’s first robotic rodeo. Fans of futuristic home appliances may remember LG’s CLOi robots, which arrived in 2018 to much fanfare but haven’t really lit up the world.
This time around, LG appears to be taking a more focused approach, aiming to seamlessly integrate robotics into its smart home ecosystem.
The engine of this robo-revolution will be an autonomous home AI hub, codenamed Q9. Think of it as a robotic butler, therapist, and tech guru all rolled into one… and it’ll be available this year.
LG tells us the Q9 uses autonomous navigation, voice and image recognition, and obstacle-surmounting technology to navigate your home.
More than just a fancy vacuum cleaner on steroids, as seems to be the case with SwitchBot’s extravagant K20+ Pro, which just launched at CES, the Q9 will join LG’s broader smart home ecosystem, which is now powered, of course, by by the excellent Athom. Home platform.
In another acquisition that signals LG’s intention to dominate smart home automation, it acquired Dutch hub specialist Athom last year and has already signaled how its technology will be combined with the existing ThinQ platform.
But the Q9 will be more than a hub on Zigbee and Z-Wave wheels. LG tells us that it will seamlessly control your connected smart home devices.
So you can ask your robot to lower your smart blinds, preheat your connected oven, or play your favorite playlist, all while happily dodging your dog and avoiding tripping on the carpet.
It also speaks thanks to Microsoft’s next-generation synthesis-based voice recognition.
If you’re wondering why exactly your smart home hub needs to follow you around the house, then it all starts to make sense when you look at how LG sees the overall progress of the Q9 and robotics.
Their “Caring Intelligence” technology may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it is the driving force behind their vision; where robots not only take care of your household tasks, but also look after your well-being and integrate with appliances based on the behavior of household members.
Like Samsung, with its SmartThings home AI plan, it’s all part of taking us to the Holy Grail of the ambient smart home, where technology blends into the background, anticipating your needs and responding to your presence without explicit commands.
LG will also open the Q9, with an SDK available for developers to create use cases for the robot.
However, this acquisition is not just about improving home robots. LG plans to create an integrated robotics platform that spans commercial, industrial and home applications. Think of restaurants that have waiters with artificial intelligence or factories that use autonomous articulated robots.
