Ever since the first trailer for Star Wars The Force Awakens hit the small screens in our palms in Fall 2014, people have been pining over the cute little spherical BB-8 droid unique to the new trilogy. While LG’s latest product for your home isn’t Star Wars licensed or anything, it certainly resembles the adorable Episode VII mascot in plenty of ways, from its spherical rolling nature to the cameras and sensors on board. At a press briefing during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this weekend LG showed us the new LG Rolling Bot as it’s called, a brand new kind of home companion that’s closer to an iRobot Roomba vacuum than it is a torch-wielding robot out of the ever-popular sci-fi series.
In a section that’s clearly shooting for more of a real-life virtual pet than home appliance, the LG Rolling Bot is shown helping monitor the house by rolling around checking windows and rooms throughout for suspicious activity. Thanks to the speaker and microphone built in to the separately controlled inner ring of the Rolling Bot, it can actually call out or sound an alarm to any intruder in the house, something that’ll surely freak a would-be robber out. That inner ring moves on its own axis separately from the outside “wheels”, allowing the Rolling Bot to utilize the bevy of sensors and an 8-megapixel camera around the unit for a full view of its surroundings. This inner ring can move up to 15-degrees up or down from its center axis, and is controlled via the LG Friends app via a WiFi connection. There’s also a microSD card slot here for storing photos and videos taken from the unit.
In addition to being your home’s personal security guard it can also be a helpful playmate for those bored cats you’ve got lifelessly hanging around on your sofas, although whether or not it’s durable enough to survive Fido’s mouth will be another story entirely. Besides keeping your pets entertained it can also keep you entertained by remote controlling any smart appliances in your home or even via old-fashioned IR controls built right into that center ring. There’s likely more than these uses for it too as we’ll soon find out when the product hits shelves, but as for price and release date we’re unfortunately not completely sure of it. On the bright side as you can see from the gallery below this unit actually exists, and is in full prototype form rather than just a patent as plenty of vaporware products end up.
