The Wall Street Journal has a great feature this morning about pets and household robots, such as Roombas and Pleos. Writer Andrew Lavallee has compiled all sorts of anecdotes—including useful tips on how to bed your pet in with the 'bot in your life, including protecting your Sony Aibo from cat bites (cayenne pepper and Cholula hot sauce applied to the 'bot butt, apparently). One dog owner told off the Roomba in front of his mutt, and the dog never lunged at the robot vacuum again. [WSJ]

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Yo, suckers! You want this robot dog to guard your home? You're a nut! Mr. T only likes Big Dogs or hot dogs! HPI's little G-Dog thing is way too small, like Murdoch's stupid dog Billy. And it's some kind of kit, so you got to be putting all those fiddly parts like plastic pieces, three-axis acceleration sensor, servos and 7.2V nickel hydrogen batterys together. With no spark-welding, man! But if you're into this crazy robot stuff: I ain't gonna stop you. You're gonna have 15 x 5.3 x 7.5 inches of robot with some crazy motion processing software stuff, and it's gonna be doing robo-doggy do on your desk. What's it gonna cost? Cool it: we don't know the price. But you can get it from July, in Japan. [Robot Watch]

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It looks like Kotaku's word on a new AIBO was fairly solid, because a new [still rumour] from Stuff talks about an AIBO PS (or AIBO PlayStation as we read that). Controlled through a PS3, the AIBO PS will appear as an avatar on the PS3 XMB (menu system). Personalities will be downloadable off PSN and...wow, it just gets better (along with the mega-sized scan):The Wi-Fi capable AIBO PS will be completely controllable through a PSP or PS3. Plus, when in security mode, the AIBO PS will be able to awaken itself when sensing sound or motion and ping your email. Your PSP could then interface with its camera and stream the signal real time. Oh, the little guy will be able to climb stairs with the best of em.

Stuff puts the probability rating at around 53%. So whether it's pure speculation or from a hot tipster, we don't know. But none of it sounds all that crazy to us. [kotaku]

According to an interview with game designer and Sony buddy Masaya Matsuura, a new AIBOesque device is in development. From his interview with Kotaku:

"The engineers behind the Aibo are doing the PS3. We are talking about making something like the new Aibo." I ask if it will connect to the PS3. Because that's what I really want: A robotic dog for my PS3. "I don't know. Connection is not hard. I'm sure some engineer could do that."

AIBOs never appealed to me. But with PS3 support and a killer app, the robo pet could actually be a lot of fun. You know, not quite as fun as a real dog. But still alright. [kotaku]