Nanyang Technological University · Humanoid · 2013
Nadine, unveiled in 2015 at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, is a lifelike social android modelled on Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann — a pioneer of 'virtual humans' who directed NTU's Institute for Media Innovation and founded the University of Geneva's MIRALab. Its realistic hardware (silicone skin, articulated hands for natural grasping) was built by Japanese animatronics firm Kokoro, while Thalmann's NTU team created the software that gives Nadine her defining qualities: a personality and emotional range, the ability to make eye contact and shake hands, and — unusually — a memory that lets her recognise people she's met and recall previous conversations. Designed as a receptionist or a social companion for people with special needs and the elderly, Nadine became a widely-cited example of socially intelligent androids, conceptually akin to Ishiguro's Geminoids in being modelled on its own creator. NOTE: specs from NTU + IEEE/press sources; recorded honestly as a seated social android; exact DOF/actuator counts not uniformly published and flagged rather than guessed.
Price on application
View full interactive profile, comparisons & videos →| Category | Humanoid |
| Sub-type | Social Gynoid (android) |
| Status | Active |
| Year | 2013 |
| Origin | Singapore |
| Announced | 2015 |
| Released | 2015 |
| Frame | Silicone skin, realistic features (modeled on creator) |
| Degrees of freedom | 27 |
| Camera | Vision (face/emotion recognition) |
| AI model | MIRALab (Univ. of Geneva) 3-layer architecture (perception / processing / interaction); multilingual conversational AI; emotion simulation; memory of people + conversations; personality adaptation |
| Actuator type | Kokoro (Japan) animatronic hardware; realistic silicone skin + hair + hands; AC-powered; upper-body/seated (stationary) |
| Use cases | Reception / customer service, Social companionship for special-needs & elderly, Human-robot interaction research, Virtual-human research |
| Made in | Japan |
