DONGGUAN, Oct. 8 (Xinhua) -- Will you keep robot cats or dogs as your pets
if they are cute and sophisticated?
Palm-sized robot pets, developed by a start-up company in Dongguan, China, are gaining popularity
SOUNDBITE 1 (English): LI RONGZHONG, Founder & CEO of Petoi
"I started this project in 2016, so(and) after 2 years, I formally formed this company. As a small company, we want to focus, so we only have two products so far. The first was a robot cat, and the second was a robot dog."
SOUNDBITE 2 (English): LI RONGZHONG, Founder & CEO of Petoi
"So far, we have shipped about more than 5,000 units worldwide. The robot is fun because it can behave like real animals thanks to the joints, so many joints on the robot, we could program some life-like movements. It's extremely hard to make it walk and balance at the same time. It requires some high-level coordination of all the legs, so users can assemble our robot first and then remote control this robot to do fun behaviors like waving hands and jumping around."
SOUNDBITE 3 (English): LI RONGZHONG, Founder & CEO of Petoi
"We launched the robot cat in 2018. So far, we have sold about 500,000 U.S. dollars, and that's about 3,000 units of the robot cat. And for the robot dog, we just launched it last year and we already shipped out about 5,000 units."
