Sharp RoBoHoN lite SR-05M-Y

RoBoHoN lite is the entry point to Sharp's pocket humanoid family, announced on 18 February 2019 alongside the refreshed walking models and sold from 27 February. Its whole idea is subtraction: the legs stop being a means of locomotion and become a seat. The robot has seven servomotors instead of the thirteen in SR-03M-Y and SR-04M-Y, and the manufacturer's launch release lists it at about 14.8 cm of seated height and 360 g. It cannot walk, cannot stand and cannot get up after a fall; the head, arms and torso still move, so it gestures while it talks. Everything above the joints is unchanged from the Wi-Fi walker: Android 8.1 on a Snapdragon 430 octa-core, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, an 8-megapixel camera, a 2.6-inch QVGA screen, a nine-axis motion unit and an ambient light sensor, on a 1,700 mAh battery that charges in about 130 minutes. Speech recognition, face recognition, singing, dancing, e-mail, alarms, reminders and the house-sitting camera app all work exactly as on its walking siblings, over Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2 and GPS. There is no LTE, no 3G and no telephone function. The point was price: 79,000 yen before tax against 120,000 for the Wi-Fi walker and 180,000 for the LTE robot, with the same compulsory Cocoro Plan subscription. Sharp also built a variant, SR-05ME-Y or RoBoHoN lite HEMS, released the same day, which adds a link to a home energy management system: it reports solar output and electricity costs out loud, controls ECHONET Lite appliances by voice, and raises both arms when the house is running on its own power. Neither version appears in the manufacturer's current price list, which now offers only the two walking models.

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