Innovation of the Week: Funeral for robot dogs - The Boston Globe

When Sony stopped servicing its discontinued line of robot dogs in 2014, the owners of the lovable little cyborgs had to face a grim reality: their dancing, tail-wagging bark-bots might soon die. Enter former Sony employee Nobuyuki Norimatsu, whose A-Fun repair shop offered a lifeline to any malfunctioning pups. The catch: He could only fix them with salvaged parts from other dogs. And the owners of those other dogs couldn't just let them go. They needed some sort of emotionally satisfying goodbye.