Sanbot is a personal humanoid robot with its head in the cloud

This week at the IFA Consumer Electronics show in Berlin, Germany, a China-based AI company called Qihan Technology introduced a new kind of humanoid robot.

I know you’ve probably seen quite a few in-home robots in the news these days, but Qihan wanted to show off some of its new robot’s interesting capabilities.

The company debuted the robot with the intentions of selling it as a service, instead of a plain, old personal robot. The Sanbot platform combines hardware, apps and cloud services into one customizable and open system, offering directional solutions for home and commercial users.

The robot knows its own name, so it makes you feel like you’re interacting with a human. For example it can find you by your voice location and turn its face to you when being called.
Sanbot responds to orders like, “Sanbot, play the music”, provides weather forecasts, news stories, or a just a pleasant reply if you need to chat with someone.

Cool Features 

Sanbot is embedded with a laser projector on with 720 p resolution, which means users can watch movies, share photos, or even collaborate on projects on pretty much any surface. The bot is even equipped with a 3D camera to identify movements and gestures, offering a gesture-controlled gaming experience.

As an added bonus, users can program the robot to play specific music at a particular time or just set it to engage in some dance moves.

Sanbot isn’t solely about the fun, though. The company considers its robotic innovation to be a brilliant tutor, sort of like an encyclopedia that can actually learn even more by accessing cloud data.

The robot doubles as an in-home security system, providing 24-7 protection for the home, and when you are away, you can still keep an eye on things via mobile app.

The facial recognition system will take photos of strangers and notify users via mobile notification.
You can also get specific and have the robot guard only certain areas in the home. As an additional safety feature, Sanbot is equipped with a detection system for gas and water, too.

The company also emphasizes the robot’s usefulness for elderly care, reminding older people to take their medications on time, as well as keep an eye on their safety if they are alone.

Sanbot is pretty self-sufficient, too. When the robot’s battery is running low, it will trigger a voice alert, then automatically find the charging station to re-charge itself, so users won’t do not need to worry about whether it will go offline when they are away.

Robotics as a Service

At IFA, Qihan emphasized the robot’s role as a service. The Cloud-brained Sanbot can be customized for different business modes to provide AI services to different business, and find applications in government, hospital, retail, museum, movies ,shopping mall, bank, beauty salons, and a plethora of other venues.

The Future

According to Qihan, “The future is coming – The Sanbot robot is coming into thousands of households and series of industries, creating more convenient and intelligent life and commercial scenarios, in order to become close companions of thousands of households and intelligent partners in a series of industries.”