Sanbot

By Bayle Emlein

If you think Hello Kitty is cute, you’ll love Sanbot from Qihan. Sanbot surpasses Hello Kitty by being useful as well as adorable. As the ability to remotely manage a fleet of robots enters the mainstream, using them to take care of everyday tasks at times and/or locations that might be inconvenient for humans becomes feasible. The example at Digital Experience involved people asking for information at an airport. Instead of just one Information Booth, there could be a Sanbot at each concourse–every day, all day with no overtime for holidays and no Closed signs due to someone’s kid’s upset tummy. The most common question in the circumstances is, “Where is the loo?” A Sanbot could understand the question and provide an answer in more languages than Rosetta Stone covers.

Robots are also turning up in patient care facilities in part because they are, well, more patient than the patients. Sanbot is clearly paying attention to the human interface: the display model is about 31/2 feet tall–the size of a ten-year-old–big enough to look like it might have some answers and small enough to be relatively unthreatening. If your well-spent youth included a lot of comics or graphic novels, the facial features and limbs without digits will feel familiar. This sense of familiarity will go a long way toward getting robots accepted as electronic assistants in the real world.