Furhat Robotics Furhat Robot

History

Furhat began as a research project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where a robotic head with a projected animated face was prototyped in 2012. The first version of the Furhat platform was released in 2014, the same year Samer Al Moubayed, Jonas Beskow, Gabriel Skantze and Preben Wik spun the work out into Furhat Robotics with support from KTH Innovation.

Purpose

Furhat is built for face-to-face social interaction: the projected face, neck motion and conversational stack let researchers and businesses study or deploy spoken human-robot interaction.

Highlights

Development

In 2018 the company introduced the current generation, a stationary head with a back-projected face that can switch between characters, genders and expressions. Deployments include Deutsche Bahn station assistance and unbiased recruitment screening with TNG Rekrytering, alongside academic use in cognitive science, psychology and HRI.

Future Roadmap

Furhat Robotics acquired US-based Misty Robotics in 2022 to broaden its hardware portfolio and accelerate next-generation social robots for education, healthcare, public services and HRI research.