Sophia (robot)

Sophia
Sophia in 2018
ManufacturerHanson Robotics
InventorDavid Hanson
Year of creation2016
TypeHumanoid
PurposeTechnology demonstrator
Websitehansonrobotics.com/hanson-robots

Sophia is a female social humanoid robot developed in 2016 by the Hong Kong–based company Hanson Robotics.[1] Sophia was activated on February 14, 2016,[2] and made her first public appearance in mid-March 2016 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, United States.[3] Sophia was marketed as a "social robot" who can mimic social behavior and induce feelings of love in humans.[1][4]

Sophia has been covered by media around the globe, and has participated in many high-profile interviews. In October 2017, Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, becoming the first robot to receive legal personhood in any country.[5] In November 2017, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first Innovation Champion, and is the first non-human to be given a United Nations title.[6]

According to founder David Hanson, Sophia's source code is about 70% open source.[7] A paper describing of one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).[8]

  1. ^ a b Greshko (2018).
  2. ^ Mallonee (2018).
  3. ^ Raymundo (2016)
  4. ^ Hanson (2019).
  5. ^ Reynolds (2018).
  6. ^ UNDP (2017).
  7. ^ Jewell (2018).
  8. ^ Hanson et al. (2022).