Sharp RoBoHon – Smartphone in a robot jacket
Is it a robot? Is it a smartphone? No, it’s RoBoHon. According to manufacturer Sharp, it is a smartphone that conquers your heart, but at first it naturally looks like a robot. We were introduced to RoBoHon at MWC at Qualcomm’s booth, where a friendly Japanese man gave us an extensive demonstration of what RoBoHon can do.
Although it is a prototype and we see it as a funny glimpse into what the future can bring, Sharp takes its own robot quite seriously. The little guy has something in the house. For example, it can stand up on its own, which is difficult for many robots, and walk without falling off anywhere with the help of its sensors. RoBoHon also enjoys a good dance, while exclaiming that he is very good at it. A bit arrogant, but we have to say that he has flexible hips.
Fortunately, this smartphone can also do some practical tricks. For example, with the help of facial and voice recognition you can ask him if he wants to take a photo or video of you. He then does so obediently and shows the result on request via his pico projector. According to Sharp, this projector would be the smallest in the world, so that it fits into RoBoHon. After all, the robot is only 19.5 cm tall. It is not heavy, by the way, with a weight of 390 grams. That’s about two hefty smartphones.
You can also ask the robot friend to look up information for you. For example, according to the Japanese, you could ask if there is a nice restaurant nearby. RoBoHon also likes to read Wikipedia if you want to know something. Reading a story to your child should therefore work and that can be quite a handy application. We have not been able to see whether the voice recognition works properly, because the demo that was given was a fixed series of actions and was therefore executed whether or not the Japanese man gave commands. According to him, the voice recognition did not work or did not work well on the very noisy trading floor, so he did not want to risk it.
RoBoHon runs on Android and you can also install apps, just like with more boring smartphones. You can also make calls with RoBoHon, which looks rather funny. The robot raises its arms when you receive a call and as soon as you pick up its legs slightly forward, to take on the shape of a horn as much as possible. Having a robot on your ear is a strange experience, we thought.
We did get a bit of a 1.0 feeling with this RoBoHon prototype, because the projector isn’t very good and the smartphone screen and navigation don’t feel very high-end either. Anyway, it is not even certain whether the robot will be for sale in Europe at all. The Japanese man we spoke to couldn’t tell us anything about that. The price and date of availability are also not yet known. We do know that RoBoHon runs on a quad-core Snapdragon 400 chipset with Adreno 305 GPU. It can hold a SIM card and it has support for 4G and WiFi.
For a consumer robot that, given the specifications, will hopefully not cost a lot of money, RoBoHon is a nice companion. For now it is more of a funny gadget than a practical help. But if robotics become cheaper to produce in the future and what’s on them a bit more functional, we will see this kind of robot gaining popularity outside Japan as well.