According to Bloomberg News on April 4, Apple has a team working on personal robotics, a field that could become one of the company's evolving "next big projects," according to people familiar with the matter.

    Apple engineers have been developing a mobile robot that could follow users around their homes, said the people, who asked not to be identified. Apple, the maker of the iPhone, has also developed an advanced desktop home device that uses robotics to move a display, they said.

While the effort is still in its infancy - it's not clear if these products will eventually be released - Apple is under increasing pressure to find new revenue streams. In February, the company canceled an electric car project, and it will be years before efforts to develop mixed-reality glasses become a major earner.

With robots, Apple could gain a bigger foothold in consumers' homes and capitalize on advances made in artificial intelligence. But it's unclear what approach it will take. The people familiar with the matter said that while robotic smart displays are much further along than mobile robots, that piece of the company's product roadmap has been "on or off" for years.

    Work on the robot is taking place within Apple's hardware design department and the artificial intelligence and machine learning group run by John Giannandrea. Matt Costello and Brian Lynch - two executives focused on home furnishings - have been in charge of hardware development. Nonetheless, Apple has not yet resolved to run either of the two programs as a company, and the work is thought to be in the early research stages. A company spokeswoman declined to comment.

Before the electric car project was canceled, Apple told its executives that the company's future revolved around three areas - cars, homes and mixed reality. But now there's no movement on the car project, and Apple has already released its first mixed reality product - the Vision Pro. so the focus is now shifting to other opportunities for the future, including how Apple can better compete in the smart home market.

      The desktop robot project first excited Apple executives a few years back, including hardware design lead John Turners and members of the industrial design team. Their idea was to have the display mimic a person's head movements, such as nodding, during a FaceTime video call. It would also be able to pinpoint a person in a crowd during a video call.

       But the company has been concerned about whether consumers would be willing to pay a big price for such a device. There are also technical challenges associated with balancing the weight of a robotic motor on a small frame. The main hurdle, according to these people familiar with the matter, is that Apple executives are divided over whether to move forward with the product.

      Apple has been obsessed with chasing the "next big thing" since the days of Steve Jobs. But it's much harder to design another product that can compete with the iPhone. Last year, the iPhone accounted for 52 percent of the company's $383.3 billion in sales.

The original concept for the robot was to design a device that could navigate entirely on its own without human intervention - like a car - and act as a videoconferencing tool. A super-bold idea within Apple was to have it be able to do household chores, such as washing dishes in the sink. But that would require overcoming extraordinarily difficult challenges - impossible in this decade.