Petbe Gives You a Desktop Representation of Your Pet’s Mood and Activity

It’s always a little bit heartbreaking when you have to leave your pet at home when you go to work or out to run errands. Many products exist to help you maintain a relationship with your pet even when you’re not around. Internet-connect cameras can let you keep an eye on your best friend, automated food dispensers can keep them well fed, and there are even treat dispensers that you can trigger remotely. But those don’t give you a tangible representation of your pet when you’re at work. Petbe is a desktop social robot that behaves according to what your pet is actually doing so you can always keep an eye on them.

Petbe was developed by a team from Companoid Labs at Seoul, Korea’s Yonsei University. The robot is essentially a cute smartphone holder that resembles a small animal. Your smartphone is held where the pet’s head would be, and displays an animated representation of your pet. A small servo motor can tilt the phone back and forth in order to add some dynamic movement to the robot. But this isn’t just a cute smartphone holder, because the robot actually represents your pet’s behavior in near real time.

The pet is outfitted with a small Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon attached to a harness. The signal strength coming from the Bluetooth beacon is monitored by a Raspberry Pi Zero W in order to perform rudimentary location tracking. This lets Petbe know if your pet is still and presumably sleeping, if it’s by its food bowl and likely eating, if it’s running around the house, and so on. The image on your smartphone is then updated to reflect what the pet is doing. All you have to do is glance at the Petbe social robot on your desk to get a general idea of what your best friend is up to at any given time. It’s unlikely that Petbe will be sold in this form, but it is definitely an intriguing idea for animal lovers.