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A lot more at the link: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Sony-jumps-back-into-robotics-after-12-year-hiatus

Twelve years after abandoning its robot business, Sony will relaunch it next spring with a robot for homes that resembles a dog.

The team involved will include those who worked on Aibo the robotic dog. In Japan, aibo means partner.

The company is now forming a development team of people formerly involved with Aibo, a robotic pet dog that captured media attention years ago.

Sony's new robotic pet will control home appliances via voice commands, they hope advances in AI meant that pet will act like a real dog. In other news robot dogs will behave like real dogs and eat someone else's poop.

The company's first foray into the field will be a robotic pet, frolicking like a real dog while controlling home appliances at voice commands. It will be similar to smart speakers equipped with AI and internet connectivity, such as those offered by Amazon.com and Google, except that it will look and, to some extent, act like a dog.

Sony plans to make the proprietary operating system an open platform to allow outside developers to add features. In addition, technologies have already been mapped out that enable the robot to mimic canine behavior using advanced electronics.

Why Sony may not be able to compete in the industrial robot market.

The in-home robot represents a strategic shift for Sony, whose President and CEO Kazuo Hirai suggested in June 2016 that the company may develop robots for industrial use, such as factory automation. Since then, however, the bar for cracking the industrial robot market has been deemed too high and would force Sony to compete with established players that already have high market shares. Sony feels there is a better chance for success in the home-use robot sector since it is still at a nascent stage.

Japan tops the global market for industrial robots, lead by Yaskawa Electric and Fanuc with their welding and assembly robots.

Why Sony can't compete in AI as well.

Sony develops its own AI, but lacks the huge amounts of data needed to make it viable compared to Google and Amazon.com, which have huge repositories of data collected through their online platforms. During a high-level meeting in August, Executive Deputy President and Chief Financial Officer Kenichiro Yoshida said the company "can no longer compete in the same arena with them," referring to the two U.S. giants.

There's more info in the link including why Sony's robotics division was shut down.