TCL-Backed AiMe Home Companion Robot with Sunburst 5 Chip Opens Pre-Sale

On August 8, AiMe, the family 'companion and nurture' robot invested by TCL, officially launched its first presale. The new product is powered by the Sunburst 5 chip from D-Robotics, integrating a front and rear dual perception system that efficiently fuses multi-sensor data, enabling precise perception, autonomous movement, and intelligent interaction. These core capabilities lay a solid hardware foundation for creating a new AI family entity with intelligent perception, long-term memory, and sustainable growth, officially establishing the new category of 'companion and nurture robots'.

After its impressive debut at CES and subsequent appearances at AWE and IFA 2025, AiMe has evolved from a concept prototype to mass production, redefining the AI family robot.

The new generation AiMe is a comprehensive upgrade over the first generation, targeting families with children over three years old. It focuses on three growth goals: proactive exploration, expressive communication, and good habits. Leveraging a proprietary children's content system, AiMe is designed as a new AI family entity with intelligent perception, long-term memory, and sustainable growth. Its cute and lively appearance naturally bridges the gap with family members, and its multimodal interaction capabilities support voice recognition, emotion perception, and lifelike action feedback, allowing it to continuously learn and adapt to family members' behavioral habits during daily interactions.

Compared to common shortcomings of existing children's companion products—such as one-way content playback, lack of spatial mobility, single interaction mode, and inability to truly stimulate children's autonomous exploration—AiMe breaks through these limitations with its triple core advantages: AI technology system, professional-grade hardware, and a continuously iterating scientific parenting content system. It offers a scientific companion plan tailored to modern families, achieving a leap from passive response to proactive service.

The successful transition from concept to mass production not only demonstrates the organic integration of 'AI + IoT + robot + family companion' but also provides a mature and viable path for AI robot commercialization, accelerating the evolution of AI companion products from 'smart devices' to 'proactive companion ecosystems'.

Companion robots are among the most technically complex consumer robot categories. The fusion processing of multimodal perception data, real-time response of bionic interaction, and stable operation of mapping, navigation, obstacle avoidance, recognition, and following capabilities all impose extremely high demands on edge computing platforms. Moreover, family scenarios are sensitive to privacy and require fast response times, making it essential to build a complete intelligent loop on the edge rather than relying solely on the cloud.

Thanks to its powerful native edge computing power and mature software toolchain, the Sunburst 5 chip from D-Robotics supports the full-stack deployment of core capabilities from voice interaction to multimodal perception fusion, mapping and navigation, and following and obstacle avoidance. This allows the product team to achieve rapid response and basic function closure locally while flexibly connecting to cloud large model capabilities, striking an optimal balance among experience, privacy, and cost.

The deep collaboration between HeyAiMe and D-Robotics represents a benchmark integration of pioneering family companion category resources and professional edge AI computing technology. The combination of HeyAiMe's new companion concept and proprietary children's content system with D-Robotics' core technical expertise in edge AI creates a synergistic advantage, jointly promoting the implementation of the 'family companion' concept and upgrading the 'AI companion' concept in the family domain, moving from 'concept heat' to 'mass production experience'.

In addition to providing high-performance edge computing power, D-Robotics is further opening up a reference algorithm for vision-based mobile navigation based on binocular vision. This reference framework uses a lightweight sensor configuration of binocular vision, IMU, and wheel odometry, compatible with various robot forms such as wheeled, quadruped, and bipedal, helping developers quickly validate core capabilities like VSLAM visual positioning, mapping, navigation, and obstacle avoidance.

The fusion of visual semantic obstacle recognition and general obstacle recognition algorithms enables the robot to accurately identify small and dynamic obstacles and quickly trigger obstacle avoidance strategies, giving the robot adaptability in dynamic and confined environments. By leveraging the RDK X5 robot developer kit, ecosystem partners can directly perform deep optimization and customized development on the reference solution, shortening the cycle from prototype validation to mass production and promoting differentiated deployment of intelligent companion products within the ecosystem.