David Hanson (robotics designer)
Dr. David Franklin Hanson Jr. is an American roboticist and founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based robotics company founded in 2013.
The designer and researcher creates humanlike robots who have realistic facial expressions and conversational abilities.
He is mainly known for Hanson Robotics, the company that created Sophia and other robots designed to mimic human behavior. Sophia has received widespread media attention, and was the first robot to be granted citizenship.
Dr. Hanson was born in on December 20, 1969 in Dallas, Texas, United States. He studied at Highland Park High School for his senior year to focus on math and science. As a teenager, Hanson’s hobbies included drawing and reading science fiction works by writers like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick—the latter of whom he would later replicate in android form.
Hanson has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in film/animation/video, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in interactive arts and engineering. In 1995 as part of an independent-study project on out-of-body experiences, he built a humanoid head in his own likeness, operated by a remote operator.
Dr. Hanson’s dissertation was entitled Development of an Advanced Respirator Fit-Test Headform.
Dr. David Hanson’s career has focused on creating humanlike robots. Hanson's most well-known creation is Sophia, the world's first ever robot citizen.
In 2004 at a Denver American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference, David Hanson presented K-Bot, a robotic head created with polymer skin, finely sculpted features, and big blue eyes. Named after his lab assistant Kristen Nelson, the robot head had 24 servomotors for realistic movement and cameras in its eyes. At the time he was 33 years old and a graduate student at the University of Texas Dallas.
After he graduated from university, Hanson worked as an artist, and went on to work for Disney where he was a sculptor and material researcher in the Disney Imagineering Lab. He has worked as a designer, sculptor, and robotics developer for Universal Studios and MTV. In 2004, Hanson built the humanoid robot Hertz, a female presenting animated robot head that took about nine months to build.
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