There haven’t been a huge number of female robots in Hollywood or in the real life robot building community over the years.
The latest one from Hanson Robotics called Sophia did garner a great deal of attention in 2019 and since then.
The famous director Fritz Lang featured one of the first robots in a movie called “Metropolis” set in the year 2026.
This robot was a female and was created to be evil which may have set a bad precedent for robot characters into the future.
Female robots are called Fembots or gynoids and there are not too many female robots in modern day toys at least compared to the number of male robot toys.
Wowwee did come out with a female version of their Robosapien robot toy before the year 2000. There have been a handful of robotic type toy females created in the last few years and some robot toy humanoids and animals created to appeal to young girls.
Hollywood has portrayed robot females in different ways over the years.
We had the cartoon robot named Rosie in the Jetsons television cartoon series in the 1970s.
Modern tv in 2020 had shows like Westworld and which certainly portrayed the female robots in different ways with the usual spin on their appearance and certain roles as in Westworld as the bar maid, the prostitute and the one which seeks revenge on the humans who abused her.
Other female robots include Harmony from Robotix, Erica, Jia Jia from China.
Here is a link to the Erica robot from Japan created by Hiroshi Ishiguro. The robot was created to study human computer interaction and was taught several acting skills which were eventually put to use in a Hollywood movie. Here is a link to see what Erica looks like. It is similar but more human looking than the Sophia robot (with the back of its head exposed) from Hanson Robotics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyJ-xLj9SEE
On the technology side, Erica is said to have 20 DOF in the upper body, two 16 channel microphone arrays, 14 infrared depth sensors, face reconition and very advanced speech synthesis ability.
Some other female robots from the last 5 years include:
- Saya
- – Sophia
- – Kodo Moroid Japan 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyl72Re5110
- – Toshiba’s ChihiraAiko robot Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AENLUDivk2w
- – MiMadoka
- – Miim 2018 China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuh1pPMvM4&t=23s
- – Actroid Der 2 – Japan 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtuioXKssyA
- – Actroid F in 2010 Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFVlzUAZkHY
- – Erica
- – Jia Jia
- – Grace 2021 USA Hanson Robotics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2p99YPEPZk
(under construction Oct 27 2021)