Furhat for Research

The Furhat for Research Package

The leading solution for those looking to advance science and innovation in social robotics and conversational AI

Scroll down to read more

Designed by researchers, for researchers

The Furhat for Research package was designed to give researchers, academics and explorers the tools, flexibility and freedom to conduct research across a wide range of fields within social robotics. The package contains a powerful, unified set of tools to allow for extreme customization, rapid prototyping and enhanced skill development. With 20+ years of research and prototyping under our belt, we know what you’re looking for in a social robot.

Become a part of a passionate community of researchers

One powerful platform, many different applications. Join the world’s leading researchers in advancing our collective knowledge in fields including HRI, Conversational Agents and Cognitive Development. Unlike our commercial model, the Furhat for Research package is available to purchase as a one-time fee; including warranty, support and full access to developer tools, the Furhat API, tutorials and our documentation. Unlimited SDK licences are offered without fee, ideal for academic environments. We also include our prototyping tool, based on Google Blockly; perfect for teaching programming, prototyping conversational interactions or controlling Wizard of Oz experiments.

Research areas

Our customers are using Furhat for cutting-edge research in many fields

HRI researchers deploy social robots to study the implications of the technology and the design of robots to understand how we will interact with them.

Researchers in artificial intelligence and conversational technologies are embodying conversational applications on social robots to understand the implications of conversational agents in our everyday lives.

Social robots are powerful interfaces for studying memory, attention, learning, and other cognitive functions in different groups of people, e.g. autistic children.

Creators of expressive characters bring them to life on social robots by customizing the appearance and behavior creating characters that people connect to emotionally.

Social robots enable researchers to run controlled experiments to understand human psychology, language, social behaviour and more.

Artists harness the emotional impact that social robots have on people to engage them in the conversation of the role of technology in our lives.

See how the brightest minds in research and academia are using Furhat

Disney Research is building the future of child-robot interaction. How to talk to children in an engaging and fun way is a challenge that their team of Imagineers are working on in order to put interactive robots in their theme parks.

Honda’s main R&D lab, famous for creating the Asimo robot, is developing Furhat as a conversational hub in the area of healthcare for the elderly in smarthome environments.

Heriot-Watt was the first university in the world, outside of KTH, to recognize and order a Furhat. Professor Oliver Lemon and his team have been using Furhat together with the dev-kit in courses on Conversational Agents and Spoken Language Processing. Currently, Heriot-Watt has several Furhat Robots in their lab, allowing students to bring their ideas on conversational agents to life.

At the Creative Design Department at Bandai Namco, Shohei Nakanowatari and his team have embodied the virtual character of Mirai Komachi – a character for the VOCALOID Singing synthesizer – using the Furhat platform.

At the Social Robotics Lab at Uppsala University in Sweden, Professor Ginevra Castellano and PhD Student Maike Paetzel are currently using Furhat to investigate how people’s perception of the robot changes over time, and how people react to robots with different levels of realism and human-likeness.

ADAPT is a new 60 million euro research center based in Dublin and one of the world’s leading international hubs for cognitive science and human-computer interaction.

ADAPT is using several Furhat robots to develop the next generation of computational models to transform how people interact with each other.

”For our research, we can easily design child-robot interactions with the Furhat SDK. In our Conversational Agents MSc course, it was great that students can work with the virtual Furhat at home and later run the same skill on the physical Furhat.”