Hanson Robotics

A Hong Kong maker of realistic-faced humanoid robots, creator of Sophia.

Hanson Robotics was founded by American robot designer David Hanson in Dallas (sources give both 2003 and 2007 as the founding year), relocating to Hong Kong Science Park in 2013, where it remains headquartered. Hanson studied film animation as an undergraduate, earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas, and had worked as a sculptor and materials researcher at Disney Imagineering. The company's specialty is realistic faces: the head is covered in a proprietary elastic skin-like material called Frubber, with motors underneath pulling it into expressions. Its best-known creation is Sophia, unveiled in 2016, along with Albert HUBO, an Einstein-faced robot built with KAIST's HUBO humanoid. It also formed a joint venture, Awakening Health, with Singularity Studio, a spinoff of SingularityNET, releasing the Sophia-platform care robot Grace in November 2020. Its robots emphasize expression and conversation demos, with very limited walking and manipulation ability, and the company has often been criticized for overstating its AI capabilities.

ExampleThe care robot Grace has a thermal-imaging camera in its chest to take an elderly patient's temperature, and can converse in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.

Related

Sophia (Hanson Robotics) · Hyper-Realistic Humanoid Robot · Uncanny Valley · Human-Robot Interaction · Engineered Arts Ameca · Companion Robot

Sources

Hanson Robotics - Wikipedia
David Hanson (robotics designer) - Wikipedia
Meet Grace, the healthcare robot COVID-19 created（China Daily HK）
Awakening Health Launches Humanoid Robot Healthcare Assistant Named Grace（Voicebot.ai）

As of

2021-06