Sophia

Hanson Robotics

China

Product Page

Sophia is Hanson Robotics' most advanced human-like robot and the company's public face, activated in 2016 and sold today as the Sophia Robot™ Utility platform. She combines conversational AI with Hanson's patented Frubber skin, a porous elastomer that mimics human skin closely enough to carry nuanced expression across the uncanny valley: the Frubber face alone offers up to 74 degrees of freedom and can produce millions of facial expressions, and the robot also carries more than 200 integrated sensors across 15 or more types, including thermal sensing, smart cameras, time-of-flight, IMU, touch, joint force and a microphone phased array. She can walk, and an optional self-charging mobile base with SLAM and LIDAR lets her navigate real venues autonomously for up to 16 hours a day. Developers get a documented Cognitive AI SDK covering APIs, a ROS bridge, animation and motor control, perception, interactive fiction, chatbot, natural language processing and statistical machine learning. The build is customisable in skin and arm colour and in the choice of mobile base. Commercially Sophia has worked as a brand ambassador in retail and live activations and as a social influencer across art, music and performance; she has also been deployed in elder care and education. In 2017 she became the first robot to receive citizenship from any country, and she has interviewed Chancellor Angela Merkel and performed a duet with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.