Furhat Robotics - The world´s most talkative robots
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | Furhat Robotics AB |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 2 000 000 |
| Project duration | August 2014 - September 2018 |
| Status | Completed |
Purpose and goal
Furhat started with the vision of becoming the global leader in social robotics. More specifically in building a software platform and building a robot, that then can be used by each industry to develop applications for it and deploy it in the real world in front of people. By the end of 2017, Furhat had more than 50 customers in areas including psychology, education, elderly care, research and development, transportation and more. In April 2017, Furhat in collaboration with Deutsche Bahn, piloted the world´s first multilingual airport concierge robot, and is now taking it further.
Expected results and effects
Furhat Robotics is today one of the world´s leading companies within human-like and social robotics, with a software and hardware platform that is adopted by companies and institutions around the world, and with support for more than 30 languages. During this project, Furhat received support to develop partnerships with several companies to develop the technology and pilot it successful. Today, Furhat is on a fast growth curve with several partnerships around the world with several deployments of robots in the real world during the next year.
Planned approach and implementation
When this project started, voice interfaces were not common. Furhat was founded just before Siri, Alexa and chatbots started to become popular. During the last three years, that market moved very fast towards our vision and the adoption of the idea of talking to computers is now mainstream. This meant that the technologies needed to get robots to interact with people become much more mature. This enabled Furhat to grow very fast over the last 24 months by integrating with 3rd party technologies, that resulted in launching the new robot platform in November 2018.