Sophia (robot)
| Manufacturer | Hanson Robotics |
|---|---|
| Inventor | David Hanson |
| Year of creation | 2016 |
| Type | Humanoid |
| Purpose | Technology demonstrator |
| Website | hansonrobotics |
Sophia is a female social humanoid robot developed in 2016 by the Hong Kong–based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was activated on 14 February 2016, and made her first public appearance in mid-March 2016 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, United States. Sophia was marketed as a "social robot" who can mimic social behaviour and induce feelings of love in humans.
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. 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.
According to David Hanson Sophia's source code is about 70% open source. A paper describing one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).