A Cloud-Enabled Helper Robot

Sanbot has a variety of built-in sensors, cameras, and speakers to interact with humans. (Image courtesy of QIHAN.)

Chinese technology company QIHAN debuted its latest development, Sanbot, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Sanbot is a cloud-enabled, intelligent, humanoid robot designed for customer-oriented industries like retail, education and nursing homes.

Meet Sanbot

At 93 cm (3 feet) tall, Sanbot is a child-sized robotic helper. It comes with a variety of features, including a 10.1-inch touch screen on its chest, a projector in its head for watching movies, a variety of sensors and cameras and a voice that responds to your commands (and calls you “master”). It also plugs itself in when it’s running low on battery.

Sanbot processes your commands by its connection to the QIHAN Cloud, a real-time decision-making engine that leverages QIHAN’s research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. What’s more, these tools can easily be harnessed by developers with Sanbot’s open application programming interface (API).

According to QIHAN, more than 70,000 Sanbots are currently being used in the market, and 5000 Sanbots will be commercially available in the US for a base price of $12,000.

QIHAN is hoping to partner with North American businesses and application developers to help realize the industry-specific potential of Sanbot in education, healthcare, retail, hospitality and security. That’s one of the main reasons the company decided to debut Sanbot at CES.

"CES is a critical stop for Sanbot to step outside of China,” said Lv De Lin, CEO of QIHAN Technology. “Currently, we do not see any peer robotic products with homogeneous capabilities. Our primary goal now is to penetrate our product into various businesses and gain as much brand awareness among businesses.”

You can learn more about Sanbot on the Sanbot website. For more robotics news, read A Wall Jumping Robot, Inspired by Nature.