There’s this video from 2008 showing a home-made automated ball launcher for use by dogs (well, *a* dog):
Then there’s this vid from 2015 showing a much simplified commercial product that does more or less the same thing:
The commercial ball launcher concerns me somewhat due to the small size of the balls used… they would seem to be a choking hazard for dogs much bigger than chihooahooas. But otherwise it seems to get the job done, though not as spectacularly as the home-made earlier model.
Dogs, it seems, do not have a problem with robots as toys. I wonder how they’d react to fully autonomous, roughly humanoid robots? Would a dog be as comfortable being the pet of a “Chappie”-style robot as a regular human? I’m sure such tales have been written, but none immediately spring to mind as having been filmed.