Pet Robot

A socially interactive robot designed to resemble and behave like an animal companion — most famously PARO (a baby harp seal) and AIBO (a robotic dog) — used to provide emotional comfort, reduce loneliness, stimulate engagement, and support therapy for older adults, particularly in dementia care and long-term care settings. Pet robots are a subset of social robots and overlap with socially-assistive robots when used for clinical outcomes. They raise accessibility and ethics questions around consent, anthropomorphic projection, infantilisation, and whether they complement or substitute for human interaction.