Astro Bot, as a character, seemingly started as a generic tool for Sony to showcase how their new consoles worked. The race of these little critters appeared in a demo to illustrate that they lived in the PS4 controller called The Playroom. They were used to a better degree in Astro Bot Rescue Mission, quite possibly the best VR game on PS4 and there was another spinoff for VR too called The Playroom VR.