engineering

Furhat Robotics

Furhat Robotics is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Furhat Robotics rather than just read about it. In short: Furhat Robotics is a Swedish social robotics company that developed as a spin-off from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It produces Furhat, a table-top humanoid social robot, and Misty II, a social robot used in healthcare and education.

Key takeaways

Furhat Robotics belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Furhat Robotics to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Furhat Robotics from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Furhat Robotics is a Swedish social robotics company that developed as a spin-off from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It produces Furhat, a table-top humanoid social robot, and Misty II, a social robot used in healthcare and education. Its platforms have been used in academic research in cognitive science, psychology, human-computer interaction, and embodied AI, as well as in customer service, education, and healthcare.

History Furhat Robotics was founded in 2014 by Samer Al Moubayed, Preben Wik, Jonas Beskow, and Gabriel Skantze, most of whom were affiliated with the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. The company was created out of Al Moubayed's doctoral research in speech technology and artificial intelligence at KTH. He had previously studied computer science in Damascus, focusing on emotional speech synthesis, and completed a master's degree in speech and language technology in Belgium. While developing a social robot prototype, Al Moubayed posted a video of the robot online and was contacted by Disney's R&D team, and he travelled to Pittsburgh in 2014 to collaborate on development. He founded Furhat Robotics in Stockholm later that year with support from KTH and Disney collaborators. By 2017, the company had 13 employees and reported 50 customers, including Disney, Intel, Honda, Merck, KPMG, and Deutsche Telekom. In September 2017, it received $2.5 million in seed funding from venture capital firms Balderton Capital and LocalGlobe. In 2019, the company worked with Swedish recruitment firm TNG to develop Tengai, a robot designed to standardize interview processes. In January 2022, Furhat Robotics acquired the U.S.-based Misty Robotics, and incorporated it's mobile platform into Furhat's offerings. incorporating its product line and technologies and adding a mobile robot platform to Furhat's stationary robots. The acquisition also allowed Furhat to market its products in the education and healthcare domains. As of 2025, the company's robotic platforms have been used by university research teams and companies in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan, and the Middle East.

Products Furhat is a humanoid bust with a back-projected face capable of displaying various virtual characters. It supports interaction through voice, facial expressions, eye contact, and head movement. Misty is a programmable social robot originally developed by U.S.-based startup Misty Robotics, spun out of Sphero in 2018. The Misty II platform, used in education, research, and front-desk assistant roles, has a mobile base, built-in sensors, and a customizable personality.

Business model The company operates a platform-based business in which third-party developers build applications for its social robot interfaces. Revenue comes from B2B hardware sales, mainly to universities and research teams, software development kit (SDK) licenses, and enterprise partnerships. A 2021 study of social robotics in manufacturing identified Furhat as one of a small number of companies piloting human-interaction robots in commercial settings. The platform combines a robotic head with a back-projected face with an SDK and conversational operating system. Developers can use Kotlin-based scripting, Python APIs, or graphical, no-code tools. It also integrates third-party text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition systems, voice cloning, and large language models. Tengai, a recruitment robot developed with the Swedish hiring firm TNG, was built on Furhat's hardware and operating system with its own dialogue model for structured job interviews. It was spun off in 2019 into Tengai AB, which continues to license Furhat's technology. The consultancy Rohrbeck Heger cited Furhat as an example of a startup building a developer ecosystem around a platform-based business model.

Awards and recognition In 2019, Furhat Robotics was selected as a finalist in the Robotics and Hardware category at the SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards. Furhat Robotics was among ten recipients of the Netexplo Innovation Award, presented during the Netexplo Forum at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

References

External links Furhat Robotics Misty Robotics

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Furhat Robotics

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Furhat Robotics claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Furhat Robotics before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Furhat Robotics ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Furhat Robotics

In research: Furhat Robotics appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Furhat Robotics in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Furhat Robotics is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Artificial intelligence companies, Companies based in Stockholm, Swedish companies established in 2014, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Furhat Robotics outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Furhat Robotics in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Furhat Robotics means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Furhat Robotics out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Furhat Robotics in simple terms?

Why does Furhat Robotics matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Furhat Robotics?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Furhat Robotics.